Op-ed by Laura Gibney
On August 25, many North Carolinians were made aware of a direct connection between their state and the dystopian images on their television and social media screens of starved unarmed Palestinians being gunned down daily at aid distribution sites in Gaza. That day, approximately 60 protestors from a coalition of North Carolina peace and justice organizations held a “Bread Not Bullets” rally in Davidson condemning the actions of a local company, UG Solutions, in the deadly aid distribution scheme run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
The GHF is a U.S. and Israeli-backed private organization established in early 2025 ostensibly to distribute humanitarian aid in Gaza. Its formation came after Israel refused to allow the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) and other humanitarian organizations to continue distributing aid in Gaza. This was based mainly on unsubstantiated allegations of misconduct, including the claim that aid was being diverted by Hamas, the political and military organization in Gaza that had carried out the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel. The UN and other aid organizations denied Israel’s claim of Hamas diverting aid and a USAID analysis found no evidence of it.
For nearly three months in 2025 Israel blocked any aid from entering Gaza, only barely easing the blockade in late May when the GHF began distributing minimal rations through four military-controlled stations, all located within areas designated as active combat zones. Previously, UNRWA had run 400 non-militarized aid distribution sites in Gaza.
The North Carolinian company, UG Solutions, is one of two US private companies guarding the GHF aid sites. It operates as a sub-contractor to the security and logistics firm, Safe Reach Solutions, led by former CIA covert activities chief Philip Francis Reilly. As a mercenary company, UG Solutions contracts former members of US Army Special Forces, and others, and deploys them to Gaza to man these militarized aid sites. Many of the contractors hired are from North Carolina.
Recently, a British Broadcasting Corporation investigation found that UG Solutions has been hiring members of an anti-Islamic US biker gang, the Infidels Motorcycle Club, to run its armed security in Gaza. Infidels MC was set up by US military veterans in 2006; members see themselves as modern Crusaders, using the Crusader cross as their symbol—a reference to the medieval Christians who fought Muslims for control of Jerusalem. The gang has hosted anti-Muslim hate speech on its Facebook page and previously held a pig roast in defiance of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. At least seven of the motorcycle gang members have senior positions at the aid sites.
The GHF has come under heavy criticism for violence against aid-seekers by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and security contractors. The international humanitarian organization, Doctors without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), called the GHF system “slaughter masquerading as aid.” Their staff at two clinics in Gaza regularly received mass influxes of casualties following violence at sites run by the GHF. British surgeon Dr. Nick Maynard, working in Gaza, described a pattern of gunshot injuries to the groins of boys 12-15 years old who had gone to GHF sites. From late May to August 2025, 2,076 Palestinians were killed and 15,308 injured while seeking aid at these sites, according to data from Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
Several military contractors who worked for UG Solutions in Gaza came forward to international media (CBS News, Associated Press) as whistleblowers. Anthony Aguilar, a former Green Beret and resident of North Carolina, and the only one to publicly disclose his identity, stated that “the [GHF] sites were designed to lure, bait, aid and kill.”
Starving aid seekers are required to walk long distances (reportedly as much as 26 miles) in the scorching sun to the four aid sites. Once there, the aid sites open briefly (sometimes only for minutes) and erratically. The aid seekers are “funneled through narrow fenced corridors resembling cattle chutes.” If they are lucky they will receive minimal food aid (typically dry goods, with no water for preparation, and of limited nutritional value) but most will not. With contractors and soldiers who are not trained in crowd management, lethal force has reportedly become routine. Aguilar stated that he was told “we shoot to communicate” with the aid-seekers. Reports from IDF soldiers in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, indicated they were ordered to shoot unarmed civilians and some posted images of themselves engaging in this carnage on social media.
The whistleblowers from UG Solutions provided Associated Press (AP) with testimonies, videos, internal reports and text messages illustrating the violence. In one video, contractors stood on a mound of earth and after a round of gunfire, voices off-screen were heard cheering and saying “I think you hit one” and “Hell yeah, boy.” The whistleblowers indicated that the security contractors hired were often unqualified, unvetted, untrained, heavily armed and seemed to have carte blanche to do as they wished.
One Palestinian aid-seeker described what he experienced at one of these aid sites. Crowds of people, many barefoot and shirtless, arrived at the site where an American contractor waved them forward. Inside was a small amount of aid, “not enough for one-tenth of the crowd.” Then the gate was shut. Suddenly an Israeli tank fired from a hilltop. “People scream and run.” In fear, “no one cares about anyone else—they step over bodies struck by bullets.” He stated that “it was exactly like Squid Game,” a Korean survival game aired on Netflix.
The food packets distributed reportedly contained “just enough calories to prevent immediate death—a calculated cruelty designed to keep people alive on quarter-full stomachs while their bodies slowly consume themselves.” Malnutrition and dehydration during the first 1,000 days of a child’s life can cause irreversible damage, stunting both physical growth and cognitive ability.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Famine Review Committee stated that the whole of Gaza has been in IPC Phase 5 since July, the highest alert, indicating a catastrophic food emergency. People in this phase are at immediate risk of starvation; more than 700,000 people have gone days without food.
Since Israel eased the blockade in late May, a UN report indicates that an average of about 70 aid trucks have entered Gaza daily, far fewer than the 500 to 600 trucks UN agencies say are needed. Al Jazeera news reported that that only 36 aid trucks entered on a recent Saturday. Israel has prevented thousands of trucks at the Jordanian border full of food aid (some rotting) from entering Gaza.
Food suppression is not new to Gaza though it is now at a catastrophic level. In violation of international law, Israel has controlled all provisions entering the occupied territory since 2007. This included reducing the quantity of food per person to the minimum calories necessary for survival. Between 2017 and 2021, Israel also blocked materials needed to maintain the water system. In 2017, the UN stated that 97 percent of Gaza’s water was undrinkable. As a result of these dire conditions under the Israeli occupation, in 2018 the UN warned that Gaza was at risk of becoming “unlivable” due to deteriorating conditions and Human Rights Watch called it “the world’s largest open air prison.”
Since October 2023 Gaza has become the site of genocide, as determined by a UN Commission of Inquiry and numerous international and Israeli human rights organizations. Some of the deaths are due to direct military violence against civilians (bombing, shooting). The government media office in Gaza reported that from October 2023 to May 2025, 100,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on this tiny strip of land (141 square miles). Euro-Medi Monitor, a human rights organization, cited a similar figure. And Emeritus Professor Paul Rogers from the University of Bradford stated that Israeli bombing of Gaza “is equivalent to six Hiroshimas.”
From October 7, 2023 to mid-September 2025, over 64,000 Palestinians were reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health to have been killed in direct, violent deaths and had their remains identified in hospitals. This is clearly a great undercount of deaths as many people killed are never identified; their remains remain under the bombed rubble, their bodies were incinerated, or they were not brought to a hospital for identification. And, far greater than violent deaths, is the number of indirect deaths due to the imposed unsustainable conditions of life—starvation, dehydration, contaminated water and air, destruction of housing and medical infrastructure, and lack of medical care and supplies for infectious, acute and chronic diseases.
A peer-reviewed analysis published in the medical journal The Lancet in July 2024 estimated that the total death toll, including direct and indirect deaths, could have exceeded 186,000 at that point. This figure was based on historical conflict patterns that show a far higher ratio of total deaths to direct, trauma-related deaths. A more recent paper by Dr. Richard Hil and Dr. Gideon Polya, using similar methodology and data as the Lancet study, estimated that as of April 2025, 680,000 had been killed (including 479,000 children). Other estimates are lower, though often in the hundreds of thousands. It is, at this point, impossible to know the exact number but what is obvious is that massive slaughter is occurring.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is clearly part of the plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. Three of its four aid sites are located in the southern part of Gaza and one in central Gaza, forcing people to move from their residential areas in northern Gaza. This aligns with Israel’s plans to move the population of Gaza south towards Egypt and ultimately out of Gaza or if they remain to let them die by deliberately starving them and cutting off humanitarian aid. The Boston Consulting Group that put together the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was also part of the planning group, with Israelis, for President Trump’s Gaza Riviera Plan.
The Washington Post published a leaked prospectus of the plan, which would entail the forced displacement of Gaza’s entire population and putting the territory into a US trusteeship for at least a decade. It is called the ‘Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust’ (GREAT). A column in Haaretz described it as “a Trumpian get-rich-quick scheme reliant on war crimes, artificial intelligence and tourism.” Philip Grant, executive director of Trial International, a human rights group based in Switzerland, called the plan “a blueprint for mass deportation, marketed as development” which will be a “textbook case of international crimes on an unimaginable scale: forcible population transfer, demographic engineering, and collective punishment.”
The fact that a North Carolinian company, UG Solutions, is playing such a central role in this nefarious plan, while receiving so little coverage in mainstream North Carolinian press, is disquieting. Of course, all Americans must recognize the central role our government is playing in it. Not only did the U.S. contribute $30 million to the GHF, but also $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel in the year following the October 2023 attack, plus the $3.8 billion the U.S. gives to Israel annually. Reportedly, 69 percent of the weaponry used by Israel is American. The U.S. is also actively planning the ethnic cleansing of the native population from their homeland. This truly is the first live-streamed genocide and we cannot pretend not to know it is happening and how deeply complicit, we, as a country, are in it.
Laura Gibney, PhD, is a retired evaluator of international development programs.