Event recap: Gaza Humanitarian Foundation whistleblower Anthony Aguilar

Defending Rights & Dissent Policy Director Chip Gibbons sat down on October 16, 2025 with Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar, who worked under the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) as a contractor from May until resigning in protest in June 2025, at a packed event held at Busboys & Poets in Washington, D.C. for an extensive conversation about the horrifying scenes he witnessed in Gaza. This was the second such conversation between Gibbons and Aguilar, who first held an event together in August.

Gibbons and Aguilar began the talk by discussing GHF itself, which Aguilar claimed is an organization which “doesn’t really exist.” The original director of GHF, Jake Wood, resigned ahead of the planned May 26 ‘opening day’ because he believed that the operation would not be conducted in accordance with humanitarian principles. Wood was replaced by Rev. Johnnie Moore, a self-proclaimed Christian Zionist. In light of GHF’s uncertain future, Moore in August accepted a position as Vice Chancellor of Pepperdine University’s Washington, D.C. campus. Aguilar claimed that the chain of contracts is effectively a way to filter money through a non-profit organization into for-profit organizations such as Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions, companies with “no past performance” who were able to secure lucrative contracts in Gaza.

Discussing the apparent conflict of interest between profit-motivated organizations and humanitarian aid distribution, Aguilar explained that Safe Reach Solutions, founded by former CIA officer Phil Reilly, won its contract through the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense which among other duties controls the flow of people and goods in and out of the West Bank and Gaza. Aguilar discussed the various other groups connected to Safe Reach Solutions through the GHF, including UG Solutions (through which Aguilar was himself contracted) and the Boston Consulting Group. The latter organization (which once employed future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after his graduation from MIT), as Aguilar explained, designed the GHF distribution sites, how they would operate, and the input and output flow of people. Members of the Boston Consulting Group came under fire this past summer for their involvement in modeling a plan to “relocate” Palestinians from Gaza to Somalia.

Aguilar also discussed who exactly many of his fellow contractors were. He recounted how on his second day in Gaza, the Israeli military took them to a scenic hilltop site on the Israeli side of the border overlooking Gaza City, stocked with vending machines and binocular stands to watch the bombing of the city. There, he noticed how many of his fellow contractors had the same crusader cross tattoo, and asked what it meant. He learned they had been recruited from the American group Infidels MC, a motorcycle club founded exclusively for veterans with a long history of extreme anti-Muslim rhetoric. The group’s leader, Sgt. Johnny “Taz” Mulford, had been punished while he was in the Army for conspiracy to commit bribery, theft, and making false statements to military authorities. Mulford was “country team leader” from May to August running UG Solutions’ Gaza contract. Aguilar stated his belief that the decision to send members of a Christian nationalist, anti-Muslim organization into a predominantly Muslim area for the purpose of delivering humanitarian aid “doesn’t make sense, unless the intent was to kill people.”

Aguilar discussed various aspects of GHF’s operation which he believes to be in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law, including the placement of the aid distribution sites themselves. He explained that the sites were built deliberately in the middle of the combat engagement area of Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which meant that the system would force a transient population of civilians to either stay in place and risk death by starvation or to traverse through an active combat zone in the hope of acquiring food. Aguilar also explained how the site placement actively contributed to the internal displacement of civilians of central Gaza, between the Neztarim Corridor to its north and the Morag Corridor to its south. All three of the aid sites were south of the Morag corridor, and so if a Palestinian from central Gaza (for example, the city of Khan Younis) wished to receive food aid, they would be forced to cross the corridor southward, and would not be permitted to cross northward to re-enter central Gaza and return home. Aguilar stated that he believes that the overlap between active combat zones, aid distribution placement, and the movement of internally displaced Palestinian civilians, was intentional, and that Israel’s actions in Gaza in general constitute a genocide.

Aguilar explained the use of live-fire by contractors and the Israeli military in order to engage in ‘crowd control’ of masses of Palestinian civilians coming to seek food aid. For example, when large groups of Palestinians would come to areas at the intersection of the Morag and Coastal Corridors, in an attempt to “show” the civilians where they wanted them to turn, live ammunition would be fired from coaxial machine-guns from Merkava tanks in an attempt to get them to move in the desired direction. Aguilar had suggested to his superiors that they should simply install some sort of signage in order to direct their movement, and was told that such a solution was “not in the budget.”

Talking about his interactions with Palestinians, Aguilar stated that in his entire time in Gaza, he “never saw one armed Palestinian,” and “never saw any return fire” toward Israeli forces. He was “always greeted with gratitude, with hope, and with sadness.” Aguilar, recounting witnessing a widow, dragging a wooden pallet with the bodies of her dead children on them, begging for mercy, asked “How can you look at someone like that and shoot them?” He stated that there was not a single Palestinian he met who did not try to kiss, hug, or thank him.

Recounting another specific interaction, Aguilar discussed a young boy he met named Amir at Distribution Site 3, nearest to Khan Younis. Originally from Khan Younis himself, Amir’s father had been killed in an Israeli airstrike on the city, and Amir was separated from his mother. Taken in by another family at a United Nations camp for internally displaced Palestinians, he had come with one of the elders of that family to the distribution site that day, but was separated from them when they were shot at by the Israeli military. Amir was standing there, alone in a warzone, shoeless, with signs of scabies beginning to show on his skin, when Aguilar called Amir over to them to try and get him some of the remaining scraps of food, where Amir kissed his hand and held it to his forehead. As Amir returned to the rest of the group to return to their homes with whatever food they had managed to get, the Israeli military began firing at the crowd in an attempt to move them westward. Amir and several other unarmed Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire. Aguilar explained how “after each distribution, the IDF would come through with their front-loading bulldozers and flatten the area out,” and that in their wake ‘are all those that were dead, buried under rubble, under dirt,” and talked about how the bodies of unarmed Palestinians are being found by their grieving relatives all around the former GHF distribution sites.

Aguilar concluded his discussion on Gaza by talking about his fears for the future of the United States with regard to Israel, saying that he sometimes cries when he sees his son asleep in bed “for what we are leaving our children.” Aguilar also voiced specific fears that the United States will be dragged into a regional war on behalf of Israel in service of the expansionist ideology of creating a ‘Greater Israel’ (by acquiring claimed territories in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere), saying that “it’s going to happen if we continue down this path.”

Finally, Gibbons concluded the discussion by asking about a recent article published in the New York Times about the covering up of accusations of war crimes against the Special Forces Green Berets in Afghanistan, of which Aguilar was a member. Aguilar had been working with the authors for several years in service of this story after he was horrified in particular by the 2015 airstrike by the United States of the Kunduz Trauma Center operated by Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan, as well as by what he sees as a broader problem of a consistent lack of accountability for those responsible for accused crimes. “There is a subculture of violence and hate” that exists as an “evil cancer from [over 20] years of war]” in the military, claims Aguilar, connecting this today to the behavior and rhetoric of current Secretary of Defense Hegseth.