TV News LIES

A retired U.S. Army officer who worked as a subcontractor for the shadowy Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is sounding the alarm over the atrocities he said he saw Israeli soldiers and American mercenaries carry out against starving Palestinians trying to access aid.

Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar, who served 25 years in the U.S. Army Special Forces as a Green Beret, was hired as an independent subcontractor by UG Solutions to serve as armed security for the private, U.S.-funded GHF, which launched its so-called aid delivery sites in May.

“When I first went into this, I was excited. I felt it was a noble cause,” he told Democracy Now! on Tuesday. “Within hours of being in Israel and seeing how this was going to unfold, I immediately had dire concerns as to the intentions, as to the execution, and what was going to happen when this fails.”

Aguilar said he ended his contract on June 14 after witnessing his fellow security officers and soldiers with the Israeli Defense Forces repeatedly open fire on Palestinian civilians who had trekked to GHF’s four aid hubs. Armed officers often celebrated hitting civilians at the sites, where the United Nations says more than a thousand Palestinians have been killed.

The IDF has maintained that soldiers only use their guns to deliver warning shots for unruly crowds. But Aguilar said that officers attacked civilians with tank rounds, mortars and fully automatic weapons with at least 210 rounds each of green-tipped, armor-piercing ammunition designed to kill.

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Dozens of rabbis were arrested Tuesday morning after staging a protest at the office of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, calling for aid in Gaza and an end to what they called the Israeli government’s “blockade” of the enclave.

The arrests come a day after eight rabbis were arrested at a separate demonstration in New York City, in a sign of surging Jewish concern about the condition of Gaza civilians.

In Washington, the group of 27 rabbis affiliated with the advocacy group Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza entered Thune’s office at around 11:10 a.m. Tuesday morning, and displayed banners reading “Rabbis say: Protect Life!” and “Rabbis say: Stop the Blockade.”

The demonstration called to mind some of the protests by rabbis and other Jews in favor of a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war that took place regularly in the war’s first year, and some of the rabbis arrested were involved in those protests as well. But it comes as calls for an end to the war and relief for Gazan civilians grow more mainstream, amid a hunger crisis that has captured headlines around the world.

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According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) platform, two out of three famine thresholds have been reached in Gaza: plummeting food consumption and acute malnutrition. Famine has not been declared as the third criteria, deaths from malnutrition, cannot be demonstrated.

There is mounting evidence that “widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease” are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths, which is the third famine indicator.

“It's clearly a disaster unfolding in front of our eyes, in front of our television screens,” said Ross Smith, UN World Food Programme (WFP) director of emergencies.

“This is not a warning, this is a call to action. This is unlike anything we have seen in this century,” he told journalists in Geneva.

The context to the alert is stark: one in three people is now going without food for days at a time, the IPC said. Hospitals are also overwhelmed and have treated more than 20,000 children for acute malnutrition since April. At least 16 children under five have died from hunger-related causes since mid-July.

The alert follows a May 2025 IPC analysis that projected catastrophic levels of food insecurity for the entire population by September. According to the platform’s experts, at least half a million people are expected to be in IPC Phase 5 – catastrophe – which is marked by starvation, destitution and death.

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Two major Israeli human rights groups released separate reports on Monday concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, joining a growing number of international voices that have made similar accusations against the country that has been destroying the Palestinian territory over the last 22 months.

In their comprehensive reports, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights lay out how Israel, as an occupying power, has used its government and military to systematically obliterate Gaza in a way that both destroys the Palestinian people and renders the territory completely uninhabitable.

“We are seeing a combination of genocidal practices – meaning mass killing, starvation and destruction of civilian infrastructure, and you can add destruction of cultural institutions – and a policy whose aim or declared aim is ethnic cleansing, all combined with statements by many senior Israeli officials throughout the war that the goal is destruction of Gazan society as a group,” genocide researcher Shmuel Lederman said in a B’Tselem video announcing the group’s report, “Our Genocide.”

As with previous allegations of genocide, the Israel Defense Forces said Monday that the reports’ claims are “unfounded” and that the Israeli military is rooting out Hamas while “taking unprecedented measures to prevent harm to civilians.”

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One meal a day. Forced to choose which of her kids get fed. In the market, because all the banks are closed and there is a cash liquidity crisis, $20 for a single egg; $1,400 for a bag of flour that might last 20 days.

Such is the plight of Gazans like Amal Nassar, 35, an English teacher from Deir Al-Balah in the central part of the Palestinian enclave. Nassar, her three children and her husband are among more than 2 million Gazans who remain trapped almost two years since the war that began after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

"We don't have enough to eat," Nassar said in a WhatsApp message over the weekend. USA TODAY has written about Nassar's story of giving birth to her daughter Mira in a war zone without access to pain relief.

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Former President Barack Obama added to growing calls for aid in Gaza as dozens of Palestinians have perished from starvation and global experts warn of looming famine in the region.

“Aid must be permitted to reach people in Gaza,” Obama wrote in a Sunday statement on X. “There is no justification for keeping food and water away from civilian families.”

Obama’s statement comes as Israel has resumed its military offensive in Gaza, and imposed a blockade of goods that has stymied access to food, water and medical supplies. Although Israel has previously claimed that there are routes for aid to enter the Palestinian territory, physicians, human rights organizations and civilians have reported scant ability to access or distribute these resources, growing cases of starvation and violent attacks by Israeli soldiers at aid sites.

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