“Designed as Death Traps”: U.S. Veteran Alleges Israeli Forces Deliberately Fired on Civilians at Gaza Aid Sites

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza had escalated to disaster levels, but new information from a retiring U.S. Army Green Beret gave the already dire situation an even darker hue. Tony Aguilar, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and veteran combat officer, has come forward with horrific charges that Israeli soldiers openly shot at civilians at food assistance distribution centers in Gaza turning what should have been safe havens into slaughter grounds.

Aguilar’s testimony rattled the international media, human rights groups, and diplomatic communities, his accounts repeating similar allegations made by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and UN-mandated monitors, who now warn that the delivery of military aid is assisting in facilitating possible war crimes.

Tony Aguilar is no ordinary whistleblower. He is a prize-winning, veteran Green Beret and retired lieutenant colonel who worked as a private security contractor for UG Solutions, a firm hired to provide security services on the much-criticized Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) an American-Israeli-funded initiative to deliver aid in the troubled strip.

Sent to Gaza in mid 2025, Aguilar operated out of several GHF operated facilities of aid. What he witnessed there, he reports, was not a humanitarian operation, but the large-scale exploitation of starving civilians.

Interviewing with Democracy Now! and other media sources in interviews, Aguilar stated he and other contractors were told directly that their primary client was the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and IDF was instructing them to employ deadly force.

They told us: ‘Our client is the IDF. You don’t dispute their orders,’\” Aguilar recalled. “We weren’t there to protect civilians we were there to follow orders, even if it meant watching innocent people shot down as they tried to get food.”.

He described witnessing Israeli soldiers shooting into tightly packed crowds with machine guns, tanks, mortars, and tear gas, often with little warning. In one especially haunting example, he recalled one boy, Amir, who had walked 12 kilometers to get to an aid center, to thank the guards, and then minutes afterward to be shot and killed.
“This wasn’t crossfire,” Aguilar said. “These places were set up as death traps.”

The testimony of Aguilar concurs with a stark August 1, 2025 report from Human Rights Watch (HRW), which documents a minimum of 859 civilian deaths near aid areas between late May and the final week of July most at the hands of Israeli fire.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation installations, HRW said, were poorly designed, built in areas where fighting was active, and were fenced and bermed with channels that constricted into choke points. Instead of protecting civilians, they were “militarized bottlenecks” where crowds of desperate civilians were exposed and attacked.

“These operations were not humanitarian,” HRW stated. “They were designed so as to reliably and recurrently cause massacres.”.

The Israeli government and the contractors working at GHF have both denied Aguilar’s assertions. The IDF claims its soldiers only fired warning shots or responded to perceived attacks by “hostile elements” among the crowd.

UG Solutions and its affiliate SRS claimed Aguilar lacked direct line of sight of IDF operations and denounced him for “dramatizing” and “politicizing” the events for publicity.

But Aguilar maintains otherwise and he is not alone. His testimony is corroborated by video witness accounts, eye witness reports, and the testimony of international monitors, many of which confirm the same patterns: people gunned down while carrying bags of flour or standing in line to be given food.

The broader context only deepens the horror. Gaza is facing famine, with over 500,000 people facing catastrophic food insecurity, the IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) says. At least two of three famine thresholds have already been reached severe hunger and malnutrition. Only the official mortality rate is unconfirmed, for lack of access and working health infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the United States and Israel still fund the GHF as an alternative to UN sponsored distribution despite widespread condemnation that its depots are unsafe, chaotic and deadly in most instances.

Independent investigations and the GHF model’s disassembly are being demanded more and more. Human rights organizations, members of the U.S. congress, and international observers are demanding a return to UN-administered aid channels and bringing to justice those accountable for what Aguilar and others are now describing as war crimes.

For Tony Aguilar, the decision to come forward was ethical, not political. “I didn’t make it through Iraq and Afghanistan to sit quietly while children are starved and shot on our tax dollars,” he said.

His words, informed by fact, have opened the world’s eyes into a system intended to save lives but one that may be systematically killing them.