The former Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) employee who now claims he witnessed American-backed “war crimes” privately threatened to become the aid organization’s “worst enemy” after being fired “due to poor performance, volatile conflicts with staff, and erratic behavior,” according to text messages and other GHF employees who testified under oath.
Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. special forces officer who worked as a contractor with GHF, ignited a media firestorm this week when he claimed to have resigned after witnessing “the Israeli Defense Forces shooting at the crowds of Palestinians” and committing other alleged “war crimes.” News outlets like the BBC and CBS News ran with Aguilar’s account, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) interviewed the fired former contractor in a YouTube video. The stridently anti-Israel Maryland Democrat led a group of 19 senators from his party who demanded that the Trump administration pull more than $30 million in funding for GHF.
Since his June 13 termination from UG Solutions, the security firm working with GHF, Aguilar has allegedly fabricated documents supporting his case and repeatedly begged the aid organization to rehire him. GHF presented multiple text messages Aguilar sent members of the organization that directly contradict his story.
In one June 22 text message Aguilar sent to GHF leaders, he instructed them to “stop f—ing around, put me back to work, and let’s get this mission done.”
“If you want to play games, we can play games,” Aguilar threatened. “I can be your best friend, or your worst nightmare.”
The text messages and other documentation GHF published in the days since Aguilar embarked on a media campaign against the group portray a disgruntled employee who wanted his job back and who was willing to publicly slander GHF—and the Israeli military—in order to make that happen. Aguilar worked with GHF for 27 days in total, “and more than half of that time he spent in a hotel in Israel instead of on the ground at distribution sites,” according to GHF spokesperson Chapin Fay.
“Since termination, Mr. Aguilar has spread a false narrative to media outlets around the world, all at the same time begging UG Solutions to hire him back,” David Panzer, counsel for UG Solutions, said during a Tuesday press conference. “Mr. Aguilar’s activities in the last several weeks make clear that he’s making good on his threats to, in his own words, make UG Solutions, be UG Solutions’s, worst nightmare if they didn’t hire him back.”
Aguilar’s claims come at a sensitive time for Israel and the United States, as both nations battle accusations that they are exacerbating a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip by withholding food from a starving population. Against that backdrop, Aguilar’s purported documentation of “brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population” rocketed across the Western media.
In the weeks after UG Solutions fired Aguilar, he sent an increasingly desperate series of text messages that alternated between begging for his job back and threatening to undermine GHF’s aid operations.
“I allowed myself to get too attached and too deep and lost track of ‘my role,'” he wrote in a June 13 text. “You know I am capable and I want to be part of this team and part of this mission.”
By June 22, when UG Solutions declined to rehire Aguilar, he again asked the organization to reconsider.
“We can talk, figure this shit out and make this mission succeed, as a team, or we continue this petty bullshit,” he wrote.
Even after UG Solutions asked Aguilar to stop issuing threats, he informed them in early July that he had resubmitted an application to work for the contractor.
“I’m submitting a new application to UGS to be considered for contract work in Israel/Gaza,” he wrote in a July 4 message.
The bulk of Aguilar’s public claims against GHF and Israel rely on a memo he purportedly sent to UG Solutions on May 28 alerting them to supposed crimes against Gaza’s civilian population at GHF-controlled aid sites. He actually created the memo on June 21, however, and backdated it to make it appear as if UG Solutions had swept his concerns under the rug.
“The document in question was fabricated by Mr. Aguilar and backdated to May 28,” Panzer said at the Tuesday press conference while displaying metadata that proves the document was altered. “The actual date of creation—which you can see—June 21, 2025, was the same day that Mr. Aguilar sent the memo to company personnel and to the press.”
Text messages Aguilar sent in late May in which he praised GHF’s work further undermine his claims.
“It’s a privilege and an honor to see America’s best doing America’s most important work in places most Americans will only ever see on TV or read about,” he wrote in a May 29 text message, one day after he claimed to have sent the memo.
GHF also published nine sworn affidavits from other employees disputing Aguilar’s claims.
“Tony’s demeanor was often frantic and overly energetic, which contrasted with the calm and professional conduct expected in any operation’s center environment,” wrote one former Marine. “His loud, rapid speech and rambling communication style frequently created a chaotic atmosphere in the operations center.”
Aguilar’s claims that GHF personnel and the Israeli forces indiscriminately fired towards civilian populations “are inaccurate and do not align with UG Solutions’s strict policies and training on the use of force,” the contractor wrote. “If Tony claims to have witnessed such an incident, it would constitute a direct violation of UG’s written guidance and established protocols.”
A senior United States official told the Washington Free Beacon that GHF’s work has been a tremendous success and media reports have only furthered Hamas’s goals.
“During the ceasefire negotiations, ending GHF was one of Hamas’s top demands,” the official said, referring to news first reported by the Free Beacon. “That says it all. GHF has effectively delivered approximately 100 million meals in the short time it has existed. That is something that should be celebrated. Instead, the wagons—in the form of the media—have circled to kill GHF and return to the failed mechanisms that only served to keep Hamas in power and prolong the war. They have done so by chasing false narrative after false narrative, holding GHF to one reporting standard while holding the U.N. and Hamas to another.”
The official added that coverage of Israel has been so biased as to raise questions about mainstream media outlets’ intentions.
“Those of us who have been in this business for a while have never seen anything like it,” the official said. “One must ask themselves, ‘What are the media’s motivations?'”
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