DEARBORN: A former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on Sunday said it was established by Israel to “weaponize food distribution” to force Palestinians to leave the enclave.
Anthony Aguilar, a decorated former US Army Green Beret, quit the GHF after seeing how the system was being used to kill Palestinians, not feed them.
He told the annual convention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Dearborn, Michigan, that Israel uses a notorious Islamophobic American biker gang, the Infidels Motorcycle Club, consisting of former military veterans as security to achieve its goals.
Aguilar was a panelist alongside Hani Almadhoun, senior director of philanthropy for the UN Relief and Works Agency, who detailed how Israeli soldiers targeted and murdered more than 200 members of his family in Gaza. Mara Kronenfeld, UNRWA executive director, was the moderator.
The GHF operates like the mafia, Aguilar said, “but the mafia at least has principles. They don't kill children.”
He added: “The security apparatus in Gaza is under the authority and leadership of the national president of the Infidels Motorcycle Club.
“These are individuals that brandish Crusader tattoos on their bodies, 1095 on their bodies for the First Crusade … They see their presence there as a modern-day crusade. They call it a pilgrimage.”
The GHF “wasn’t created to provide humanitarian aid,” Aguilar said. “It was created so that the Israeli government can control it to implement genocide under the banner of the US.”
The Infidels Motorcycle Club, he added, “are individuals who’ve been fully armed with automatic weapons and machine guns and tear gas and stun grenades, who go into Gaza to supposedly deliver food, but who have a charter … based on fighting jihad and eliminating all Muslims from the earth. That’s their charter. That’s why they exist as an organization.”
Aguilar said what he saw during the three months he was a contractor for the GHF was “simply indescribable” and “left me speechless.”
He added: “In and around and outside these (distribution) sites, thousands of Palestinians have been killed by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). And those that aren’t picked up, or those that aren’t taken to hospital, or those that don’t survive, whose bodies are left outside of these sites, are buried by bulldozers that come in afterward.
“The US has a direct hand in that. That’s the ugly truth that the GHF and the Israeli government will try to hide because it is so abhorrent.”
Aguilar said: “What’s happening in Gaza isn’t war. It’s annihilation, it’s oppression and it’s tyranny.” The “genocide,” he added, “is being conducted through the weaponization of food, denying human beings water, forced displacement, intentional targeting and indiscriminate killing. Palestinians aren’t dying, they’re being killed. It’s by design. Israel is intent on doing this.”
Almadhoun said he tries to overcome his grief by overseeing the Gaza Soup Kitchen, which brings food to homeless civilians.
He said he saw young children approach GHF sites seeking food only to be shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.
Kronenfeld said UNRWA was running 400 sites in Gaza that, in addition to distributing food to the needy, also provided medical and educational support to civilians. Those sites were closed and replaced by five GHF sites.
“UNRWA has the equivalent of 6,000 trucks of aid, enough to feed a million people right now, just feet beyond the border. That’s not been allowed in,” she said, adding that the agency has become the primary source of medical care since Israel destroyed Gaza’s hospitals. More than 2,200 people have been killed at the five GHF sites, she said.
The final day of the ADC convention, attended by Arab News, also featured panels on how independent voices are reporting news on Gaza that is being blocked by Israel, and the challenges of humanizing Palestinians.
Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian writer, poet, scholar and librarian from Gaza, also discussed his new book of poetry “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear,” which won the Palestine Book Award and the American Book Award. It is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Walcott Prize for Poetry.
