At the end of July, US special forces veteran Lt Col Anthony Aguilar, who had been working as a contractor for the US-Israel run so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), came forward as a whistleblower and said that he had left GHF after seeing fellow contractors and IDF soldiers murdering civilians – including a boy known as ‘Abboud’. GHF denied Aguilar’s allegations as “categorically false” and claimed he was a “disgruntled employee who was terminated for misconduct”, which he denied.
Abundant video footage and reports from the United Nations and other humanitarian organisations have shown the almost-daily shooting of Palestinian civilians desperate for food at GHF ‘aid’ stations. Well over two thousand aid-seekers have been killed and more than fifteen thousand wounded.
Aguilar’s allegations gained significant international traction, in particular his account of meeting a young boy named Amir at a GHF station. Aguilar recounted Amir’s abject gratitude at receiving some food after walking around eight miles from his shelter to the station:
He puts out his hand, and so I beckoned him to come to me. I said, ‘Come here.’ And he reaches out and he holds my hand, and he kisses my hand and he says, ‘Shukran [Thank you].’
Moments later, Aguilar said, GHF mercenaries and Israeli troops fired tear gas to break up the crowd of aid-seekers and Amir ran to leave the camp. But he didn’t get far:
They’re shooting to control the population that’s along the Morag Corridor. And as they’re doing that, they’re shooting into this crowd… and Palestinians, civilians, human beings, are dropping to the ground, getting shot. And Amir was one of them. Amir walked 12km to get food, got nothing but scraps, thanked us for it and died.
The murder of Abboud: an Israeli-US cover up begins
Aguilar’s account immediately went viral, apparently a major public relations nightmare for the GHF and Israel. Al Jazeera ran a feature on it, interviewing a woman they said was the mother of the boy – whose real name they said was Abdul Rahim, known as ‘Abboud’ – and her family, who were demanding answers and trying to find his body.
Then, apparently eager to defuse the outrage, the GHF put out a video and photos that it claims show ‘Amir’ – they say his real name is Abdul Rahim, known as ‘Abboud’ – alive, well and happily standing with GHF operatives.
The GHF counter-claim was, of course, eagerly amplified by right-wing media and Israel’s army of apologists and propagandists. Israel immediately exploited the ‘revelation’ with a by now unsurprising claim that the “United Nations are misleading the world”.
But investigations by a senior journalist in the region tell a very different story – and neither possible side of it means what Israel and its apologists claim.
Untrue
MENA Uncensored editor Leila Hatoum, based in Lebanon, believes that if the GHF claim that Amir is alive is true then it is part of a coordinated attempt by US and Israeli authorities to discredit reports of the mass murders at the ‘aid sites’. But she also reports that according to local sources in Gaza the boy in the GHF video is a different child and is in fact the son of an ‘Abu Shabab’ gang member.
Abu Shabab is the ISIS-linked, Israel-funded criminal gang in Gaza that has been filmed and photographed carrying arms around Israeli troops – something that would see resistance fighters killed in seconds – and whose attacks on aid convoys and aid-seekers have been used by Israel to claim that Israel is allowing adequate food into Gaza despite its blockade, but that ‘Khamas’ is stealing it.
Hatoum believes that the most likely explanation for the course of events is that the entire ‘Amir’ story was planted in order to discredit the journalists, aid agencies and United Nations who have exposed Israel’s crimes throughout the genocide – but that, if so, it has failed in its objective:
This is the story of how intelligence agencies, including the CIA and Mossad, have planted false narratives to damage the credibility of those exposing war crimes—and, in the process, cast doubt on documented atrocities and war crimes that are widely known to the public…
Aguilar was never a whistleblower. He revealed nothing that Palestinian survivors had not already been saying for months. While starving civilians in Gaza described GHF’s alleged role in distributing aid as a form of psychological and physical control, mainstream media largely ignored them.
Even after our team revealed GHF’s links to the CIA and Mossad back in February 2025—and raised concerns about its role in replacing USAID and UNRWA in Gaza—major news outlets remained silent. GHF was established as a fake aid group, offering the illusion of humanitarian support while causing civilians’ death. In Gaza, where more than 400,000 civilians have entered Stage 5 hunger—irreversible famine, according to top international NGOs—any hint of food is a lure. Palestinians risk their lives daily for even the smallest aid deliveries. Eventually, those who launched Aguilar to limelight, retracted the support. After two months of promoting him, they pivoted to discredit his story, thinking they had created an irreversible damage of eroding trust in many credible reports about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.
But they thought wrong!
Even if Aguilar’s story was false—even if Amir never existed—thousands of real stories remain: mutilated children, murdered pregnant women, and elderly victims of the Israeli occupation forces (IOF)’s bombardment, sniping and air strikes that used US and European-made missiles, bullets and weapons. All confirmed with solid evidence, eyewitness accounts, and NGOs’ reports.
The other possibility is that the ‘Amir’ account was true and that the GHF are parading a different child altogether, but is in reality the child of a member of a terrorist gang member funded by Israel who was chosen for his resemblance to a murdered boy. More recently, it has threatened International Criminal Court prosecutors in an attempt to thwart or reverse the court’s arrest warrants, after which it mounted a mass intimidation campaign against chief prosecutor Karim Khan and pro-Israel lawyers tried to persuade female colleagues to make sexual harassment allegations against him.
The false flag around Abboud is hardly new
Israel has a long history of ‘false flag’ operations and other forms of misdirection to discredit opponents, provoke allies into action, or to try to achieve political and strategic aims, from the ‘Lavon affair‘ of the 1950 in which it bombed Jewish buildings in Egypt and tried to blame it on Muslim groups, to its air attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 to try to provoke the US into attacking Egypt, to the 1994 bombings in London blamed on Palestinian activists.
Neither possibility is the least out of character for the genocidal occupier or its US backers, “They lie and they lie and they lie and they lie and they lie”.
And neither changes the authenticity of reports by the UN and humanitarian groups of mass murders at so-called aid stations, nor of the abundant footage of shootings with tank and machine-gun fire and the shattered and shredded bodies of victims, many of them children.
Israel is a terror state.
Featured image and additional images via the Canary
