"Yes, really": American PMCs (back) in Gaza

Welcome back to the Guns for Higher Podcast. I'm Dr. Alia Rahimi from the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC. This is an emergency episode on a contentious new system for humanitarian aid in Gaza and the role of American PMCs. It's Tuesday, 3 June. Aid distribution has become a death trap. The words of a senior UN official in a statement on Sunday, more than 20 Palestinians had just been shot dead by Israeli tanks, near a chaotic and highly controversial aid distribution facility in southern Gaza. They were trying to secure food amidst a looming famine. A further 120 people were wounded at the site, including children. Unfortunately, it looks like we're seeing the explosion of yet another previously taken for granted norm in Gaza, where Israel, a party to the conflict, has seized control of the humanitarian space. The UN and international aid agencies are being entirely circumvented as the main suppliers of food to the 2.1 million people trapped in Gaza. The Israelis have tasked a new, private, untested organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to deliver food to the civilian population at four aid centers in southern Gaza, compared that to the 400 widely dispersed sites that the UN was previously operating up and down the strip. In this Israeli design system, IDF tanks and soldiers are stationed outside the perimeter with American private military contractors securing the supplies from the inside. Things have already turned deadly, multiple times. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been operational for just over a week at the time of recording, and alongside the 20 souls killed on Sunday, nine Palestinians have been killed by the IDF for trying to access food last week, and just in the last 24 hours, it looks like there was another massacre of 27 Palestinians outside the perimeter of the site, according to the Times of Israel. This is all unfolding after an 11-week Israeli blockade of food and aid into Gaza, during which Israel also resumed its military offensive. It's still barrage the enclave and killing scores of civilians as before many of them young children. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said that he wanted to expand that campaign and take control of all areas of Gaza. British Foreign Minister David Lamy condemned Netanyahu's plan to drive Guardsons from their homes into a corner of the strip to the south and permit them a fraction of the aid that they need. On the ground and at the center of this vortex are two American PMCs, Safe Reach Solutions and UG Solutions. We talked about the new PMCs in January's episode, as their contractors touched down in Gaza to secure the Netsalian corridor during a ceasefire. With us to discuss their role in the new Israeli controlled aid system is the International Human Rights Lawyer Craig McCuyber. Craig was a top UN human rights official who served for more than 30 years with postings in Afghanistan, Palestine, Switzerland and New York, and dozens of human rights missions undertaken across Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Latin America. In October 2023 Craig was the director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. As such he became the most senior UN official to leave the organization over the worsening human rights situation in Gaza, his resignation letter was leaked and quickly became viral. The McCuyber letter, as it's now known, argued that many Western countries were failing to meet their treaty obligations to ensure respect for the Geneva conventions. The letter urged the UN to remember that the world is watching. We will all be accountable for where we stood at this crucial moment in history. Craig called for a new norm-based approach to Palestine, grounded in human rights and equality for all, accountability for perpetrators, redress for victims, protection of the vulnerable and empowerment of rights holders, all under the rule of law. Craig McCuyber, welcome to the Guns for Higher Podcast. Thank you, Elliot. Nice to be with you. Craig, you were born into a working class family in Niagara Falls, one of six children. You've said that you benefited tremendously from the Head Start educational programs, established under LBJs and his war on poverty. I have to ask you, if you were born into similar circumstances today, do you think you'd have that same shot at accessing education and realizing your ambitions and succeeding the way that you have? It's funny that you start with that, Elliot. You do good production research. It's true. I was a member of the first graduating class of Head Start, which was a part of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty that gave an educational boost to kids who probably didn't get it from home because of their economic and social circumstances. And that was a program that happened in a moment when the idea in the United States of education as a human right was ascended. That age is long since passed to answer your question. The US, as you know, is still the only country in the industrialized, western world that does not view education, healthcare, other social rights as human rights, but rather as commodities for sale to those who can afford that. And I carried that on. Public school, my entire life, state university system for my undergraduate studies and for law school. Those opportunities are not there as they were before. And indeed education has become too expensive for many families. The quality of education has been diminished. Advanced education has become impossible for many who'd be born into the privilege of being able to afford it and to purchase it as a as a high priced commodity in in the United States. So I do not believe to answer your question, but people now have the same opportunities that I did back back when education was different. And indeed healthcare and water and sanitation and housing and all of those things that the University of Declaration identifies as human rights are not recognized as human rights in the United States with devastating social impacts on the people who live there. Right. On that theme of basic rights, we can turn to today's topic Craig. As you know, the Israelis ostensibly don't want responsibility for meeting the basic humanitarian needs of garsons. And they absolutely don't want the UN to do it who were expert at this, but of course Israel is experienced a massive rupture with the UN. So what do we know about the entity that they've offered up as a solution? The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Who's behind it? And and where is the funding coming from? Well, what we know is that it is a Hodgepodge of Israeli and US intelligence operatives with sketchy finance firms in the United States, mercenaries and private military contractors posing as humanitarian, but actually set up as a part of the Israeli regime strategy of occupation. The aid is being distributed. So called aid is being distributed by this shadowy US group registered in Delaware and in Switzerland called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation or G.H.F. And together with these US-based PMCs and mercenaries, one called Safe Reach Solutions, which is run by a former senior CIA officer with links to Blackwater and who has been involved in a lot of sketchy operations internationally. And another PMC called U.G. Solutions run by a former US Special Forces soldier. They're paying former special forces and other military contractors or mercenaries depending on what they end up doing. $10,000 up front and then $1,100 a day to participate in this scheme. Until just a few days ago, G.H.F. was headed by a guy called Jake Wood who was a former US military tied to the US security establishment for a long time linked to US finance corporations. But interestingly, when he resigned, he had to admit that the plan violates humanitarian principles. And I think he did his due diligence and realized how exposed he was and stepped down from the helm of this very murky organization with no humanitarian big experience. And the whole mechanism was established by people with ties to the CIA, to the Israeli Mossad, and to the Israeli and US governments. And of course, the UN, all credible international aid groups, humanitarian organizations, have universally condemned this as effectively cynical rules. And I think it was actually set up for purposes that have nothing to do with humanitarianism, which has become clear in recent days. First, Israel was receiving a lot of backlash because of its genocidal activities, and in particular, its starvation of the population in Gaza. And so it thought this would be a good fig leaf to tamp down some of that Western public pressure as essentially a smokescreen. I think secondly, it is a part of a vehicle to try to get the United Nations out of the way of the Israeli regime's plans, because the UN and UNROT, in particular, is the main lifeline of the people in Gaza, and their survivability is a challenge to what it is that is trying to achieve. And then thirdly, I think it is literally a tool to drive genocide survivors southward in Gaza into a handful of concentration points, and that way clearing the whole north of the Gaza and concentrating survivors for, in essence, either their departure from Gaza or their eventual death. So they dismantled peace by peace, an effective and efficient UNA distribution plan, a distribution network that was run by the UN. They blocked the thousands of UNA trucks waiting outside Israeli checkpoints. And then they created this fake humanitarian organization, blocked all humanitarian aid from the UN and other humanitarian organizations, shut down fully the UN operations that were there, established four so-called distribution points on the border with Egypt, and near Rafa, and one adjacent to the so-called Detsarim Court, or the Detsarim Occupation Road. And then they told starving Palestinians that to walk for hours, to risk their lives on the way, and then to stand in cages under the hot Gaza Sun for hours at its. Some of them have been abducted by the Israeli occupation forces before they even get to the cages. For many Palestinians, if you are taken by the Israelis, that means repeated beatings and torture, sexual assault, even disappearance of death. And then many of those who managed to get through these hurdles are just turned away from the distribution lines that are in no way ready to provide the food that's needed for starving two plus million people. I would also add, Alia, many people, even if they wanted to go to these traps, are too far away, too weak, sick, too disabled, and they're pregnant or caring for children. They can't even reach these so-called distribution points. And we've seen that some of those who've dared to risk it can be shot down by Israeli quadcopters in Tangsons. Sniper, in fact, more than 100 people have already been killed at these GHF aid traps. Hundreds more wounded and countless more abducted by the Israeli forces. So even just to finish this thought, even if you succeed through that, what you get is a meager package of food, well below nutritional requirements of people, and mostly dry goods with no order or fuel with which to prepare it. That is the plan that has been put forward. It is clearly not an aid plan, as it's often called in the media, is an extension of the Israeli occupation and its plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And I wonder, what would they say? Because what problem was it designed to solve from their point of view? Because the UN is adamant, isn't it, that large amounts of aid have not been diverted by Hamas. But for them, this is front and center and their narrative of why they've had to go in this direction. So there's no evidence that Hamas was benefiting from this humanitarian supplies. Well, there is no evidence at all. It is a lie that has been repeated over and over again by Israel as a justification for this rather sinister plan. It has been, you know, the UN has repeatedly affirmed senior US figures like Cindy McCain and senior US administration officials in recent days have all confirmed that there is no evidence of Hamas seizing or looting or diverting aid. It just does not happen. The UN has a sophisticated delivery system that goes directly from the checkpoints to the people in need. The only looting and interference that we have seen has been from criminal gang, which is backed by Israel, that is unleashed by the Israelis periodically, the so-called Abishabad gang. It is very much opposed by Hamas. So it is a plan based on a lie that is going to bump over and over again by everybody from US officials to UN officials to people on the ground, simply not true. But of course they needed a justification. And if you just watch what happened since October of 2023, there has been a systematic campaign by the Israelis to not only block food coming in, but to make sure that distribution centers and aid warehouses and flower mills and stores and bakeries and even the security that was provided for aid distribution, the vehicles, aid convoys, people standing in line for food, all of them systematically attacked by Israel to destroy its capacity to provide nutrition for the people of Gaza. And that is why we have reached a situation now where two million people are at risk of starvation, not because of some natural disaster lack of food, but intentionally so as a weapon of work. By one of our allies, indeed. You mentioned Jake Wood and his resignation where he became convinced that he couldn't fulfill the principles of humanity and neutrality and impartiality. But beyond incompatibility with humanitarian norms, are the foundation's activities also potentially illegal under international law? Yes, I don't argue that they are. So because the role of these paid PMCs or scenarios, you want to call them, it's especially disturbing. Imagine renting yourself out effectively as a work criminal for hire. And I don't use that phrase lightly. Because I mean, from a legal perspective, the deployment of armed US mercenaries to assist the Israeli regime in an unlawful occupation of Gaza is itself unlawful in international law. And it's not an editorial opinion to say that the Israeli occupation is unlawful. This is the finding of the international court of justice of the court, the highest courts. So they have actually attached themselves to an unlawful enterprise, which means all of their activities are by extension unlawfully, even without further crimes. Because he's heavily armed people. And I think those further crimes are inevitable. But they would be double crimes. Yeah, because their near presence under these terms, it locates them in a number of international crimes. For example, the crime of aggression as the court has found a collective punishment, which is a war crime being perpetrated on the Palestinians by the control of food and water and so on. Denial of the right to self-determination that the court has focused on. And then, interestingly, there is a crime in international humanitarian law, a breach of international humanitarian law called perfidy. If you look, and normally it's used to describe a situation where combatant disguises themselves as a civilian or as a humanitarian, a red cross person or something, and then uses that disguise to harm the other side. In this case, profiteously framing their presence as a part of a so-called humanitarian scheme does not relieve them of individual accountability. It may render them guilty of the crime of profidy. And this is defined in humanitarian law as deliberately misleading by inviting the confidence of the other side so that they believe that you are a protected person like the humanitarian. And that means posing as humanitarian workers while participating in the occupation of Gaza. It's military and political objectives, not as humanitarian objectives. They've a couple of the mechanisms of repression for personal monetary gain, and they're accountable for that. And I mean, the whole GHF plan is profiteous. And you look at it, and needless to say, it's not humanitarian aid offers. Just imagine, you know, the metaphor of Santa Claus, right? A burglar presses up a Santa Claus to rob your house. The fact that he's wearing a red hat and a white beard will not be a defense in court. He will still be guilty of a burglary. And that's what's happening. The mercenaries or let's call them private military contractors, enjoining the GHF structure are actually serving in the Israeli occupation, forces by extension, they're an extension of the Israeli occupation, which the ICJ has found on legal. That's an act of oppression. They are a part of Israel's strategy to displace and ethnically cleanse the people of Gaza. He is food, is a weapon of war, to implement collective punishment. And remember that complicity in genocide is a distinct crime in the genocide convention. So you have crime of genocide, but you also have distinctly identified another crime called complicity in genocide for which they could be held accountable in no amount of humanitarian camouflage. It's going to relieve predators of their accountability for that. So whether you define them as mercenaries of private military contracts, they're participating in what are defined in international law as war crimes and crimes against humanity. And that conduct is criminal. Of course, you know, if they open fire on people and take direct part in hostilities, they lose their civilian protection under international humanitarian law and they become legitimate military targets. But even if they don't, given their essential role in this unlawful method of price, their status is quite definition and lawfully either way in both cases, they're not even entitled to prisoner of war status and real international humanitarian law. So indeed, they are more definition unlawful. And I think any, if you are blinded by the greed of a substantial amount of income for participating in this endeavor, you should at least be aware of that the consequences can be under the law. Well, you say blinded by the greed. Some of our listeners will be professional private military contractors, military veterans looking for honest work who might be tempted by the humanitarian mission of a job like this. But from what you're saying, they'd actually be putting themselves at risk of prosecution or what would you say to them that it's blatantly not humanitarian. Well, I think there may be some private military contractors who fell for the initial ruse of selling this as humanitarian operation. They just needed security. I don't think there can be many people left after the events of the last several days who still believe the ruse. And I think to look at these things with your eyes right open at this stage, even the management consulting firm in Boston that was hired with this dark money in order to set up this operation. They have withdrawn and the partner who is involved in the endeavor has been disciplined, has been, could on leave, kind of disciplinary leave. So even those behind the operation who thought they were just taking a contract and began to realize what's really happening here and dissociated themselves. You have to are in decent minded people who think that they're taking job as security guards and innate operation to help. They need to take a more careful look and realize that is not what this is. This is not an aid operation. It is an extension of the unlawful that's where the occupation, and of its plans for the cleansing of Gaza and participation in that can bring legal liability to those. And just like, and you talked about them discharging their weapons. But do we have a sense of the rules of engagement should let's say Hamas attack or perhaps crowds of starving civilian search forward. Would it be lawful for these private citizens to discharge their weapons in self-defense if they feel under threat? And is this kind of another misoor square in the making? Well, I mean, there is a risk. First of all, discharging their weapons in effectively entering into combat, becoming combatants would remove from them their civilian status and make that legitimate military targets. There is at a very low level a right to defend yourself if you come under attack. But it very quickly ends into a murky area in international humanitarian law where you can find yourself suddenly in the status of a combatant in therefore a legitimate target. Now, Hamas does not attack a distribution. Even this profiteous one Hamas is not involved in that. The only shots that have been fired so far have been by the Israeli military. And those at civilians who are desperately clamoring to get aid. So it's an unlikely scenario. And indeed, as we know, Israel has falsely claimed on several occasions that they open fire on civilians because there was some combatant in their midst. That isn't washing anymore because it's far too much evidence in a live stream of genocide. What's happening? So I think it's an unlikely scenario. And if a private military contractor were to open fire and take out a number of or even one civilian in the process, there would be huge questions to answer. Question is, why would a private military contractor put themselves in that situation? This is not a war situation in which there's a risk that the local people are going to open fire on those distributing aid. It has never happened. It's not it's not happening now. This is a situation of a siege civilian population desperately hungry who may get out of order because their children are starving to death. Yes, that's a very hard one. We're not going to open fire in aid distribution. Even this type of aid distribution. Of course. But you know, from what you're describing, what we're seeing in real time is the weaponization and militarization of humanitarian aid and how dangerous is that I wonder? Is this now aid as a tool of war? The UNH, you've called it today, a militarized humanitarian assistance mechanism. Is this going to set a precedent? I don't think so. It's been a colossal failure already. I think there are also biabilities that have been exposed. I think there was a hope that would set a precedent. I mean, the context is you've got this final phase of an exterminatory campaign of Palestinians and Gaza. We use really regime blocking almost all aid starving the population, forcing survivors into what have been called concentration camps in the South, destroying the remaining homes and civilian infrastructure to prevent survivors from returning. And now it's deploying Israel occupation forces together with foreign military contractors to manage the final phase of its ethnic cleansing. And then simultaneously, of course, stepping up its attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. So, if you look at what has been going on since October 2023, alongside bombs and bullets and missiles and drones, the Israeli regime's most effective weapon in its extermination campaign has been food, or more precisely the denial of food, the weaponization of food. This whole Gaza humanitarian foundation activity is another case of the weaponization of food. And we, people who follow these issues have been saying from the very first day that even before you had these three deadly incidents in the last few days, that this was inevitable. Imagine violently driving starving survivors of a genocide into concentration camps, blocking all the food, making them walk for miles, then caging them in the hot sun for hours. They're standing there not knowing if they're going to manage to get food for their starving families, putting no standard humanitarian procedures for safety and dignity in place because you are not humanitarian. And then coaxing the desperate starving people out of their concentration camps with the promise of a meager package of food. By the way, these are small packages of nutritionally inadequate dry goods, as I said, clean water or energy to cook them. And then periodically opening fire and massacring them as they arrive, abducting some, dragging them off to Israeli torture chambers. The devious cruelty of this scheme is going to be studied for a very, very long time, I think. And I don't think that anyone of good faith at this stage will fail to see it for what it actually is. Yeah, so I mean, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has described it as a new creative solution to an intractable problem. So I wonder if at least in its inception, it wasn't a sort of honest attempt to think outside the box and isn't there the obligation to explore all options, including innovative methods for the delivery of aid presented by the private sector. But I mean, from what you're saying so far, that's probably not at all what's going on here, you know, from the get go. Well, the propaganda doesn't hold up because the UN system for the delivery of aid worked perfectly. I mean, nothing is perfect, but it was tried and true. It had been in place for many, many years. It was extremely efficient. It had a network that ran into Palestinian society and across the Gaza Strip. It could quickly and efficiently and safely deliver and it still kept deliver aid to all those who need it. It is being prevented from doing so and it is being ostensibly replaced with a mechanism that just by function of logic in its clear would not be able to succeed in delivering aid to those who need it. So the argument that we need to try something new when the thing that they want to dismantle worked wasn't broken. And they want to replace it with something that has no hope of working is an absurd line of propaganda for which nobody should fall. Right. You said before that usually the hardest thing in international law, particularly when it comes to war crimes is proving intent. But with Gaza, the criminal intent has probably been quite clearly stated over and over again, right? Do you think that will make prosecutions down the line easier? Well, listen, Israel is already on trial for genocide in the international court of justice. Its leaders have already been indicted for crimes against humanity by the international criminal court. Cases are being brought against Israeli soldiers and settlers and complicit western leaders in courts all around the world. And there is a consensus across all major human rights organizations, legal scholars, genocide scholars, holocaust scholars that what's happening here is the genocide. And if you want to know why there's so much certainty in this case, it's because the Israeli regime has had for many decades a guarantee of impunity from the United States, the United Kingdom, some other western governments who have not allowed accountability action against Israel or Israelis to proceed. That impunity is beginning now to crack. And a part of the reason is, in most genocides, you can have a lot of unlawful war crimes crimes against humanity. You can have massive killing, the rendering of torture and destruction, all sorts of horror. But for it to be genocide, you have to have a specific genocidal intent in the law. Normally, in order to find that you've got to dig through dusty government archives to find to some smoking gun memo that declares the intent of the regime perpetrating the genocide. In this case, that's not necessary because the sense of impunity in the Israeli government was so absolute that from October until now, indeed before even, Israeli leaders have been declaring their genocidal intent, publicly and out loud over and over again. And we're not talking about just tangential people in the Israeli government. We're talking about the president, the prime minister, at least sub and government ministers, senior military leaders. And then military on the ground and soldiers themselves repeating those genocidal threats and then carrying them out with genocidal fury in what has been called the first live stream genocide in history. Question of intent and of the crying of genocide as well as a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This never been as clear as it is in this case. And that's why legal liability is assured. Success of those legal cases is not a sure because of the obstruction of justice from powerful actors, but accountability for many, I think, is inevitable. So how about individual foreigners who might find themselves accused of aiding and abetting those crimes? Can they be prosecuted as individuals? They can. I mean, these crimes are crimes of universal jurisdiction. You can find yourself accountable in an international tribunal, but you can also find yourself accountable through so-called universal jurisdiction and third party courts. So you could suddenly find that you are indicted in a court in any western country. For example, or elsewhere, not just in the West, but there are several Western countries that have already experimented with these kinds of prosecutions. There are a number of legal initiatives already underway around the world to identify perpetrators, individual perpetrators, and to bring legal proceedings against them in various places. And you already have a situation where, you know, indicted people, even if they have not yet been arrested, are unable to travel to a lot of places where they're at risk of arrest. Some of them will ultimately be arrested. So exposing yourself to that kind of legal jeopardy it seems to me is not a particularly wise choice. I want to, Craig, if you have any thoughts about what the connection is with the deployment of the same PMC's, Safe Realt Solutions and UG Solutions to the NetZahim corridor earlier this year, which recovered in our January episode, do you think at that time they were sent in good faith to do an essential stabilization task that no one else was willing to do, and thus make the ceasefire possible? Or was there an element that was more sinister, which was about normalizing the site of American PMCs in Gaza, you know, sort of dosing us a little bit so we wouldn't be as surprised when they re-emerge now? Because seemingly the parties to this GHF plan were in discussions for well over a year. So this was on the cards for a long time before NetZahim. What's your view? Yeah, you know, the context is deep population and a lot of that population is really intense to achieve by just destruction and killing. Some of that deep population it intends to achieve by creating conditions that drive people southward closer and closer to the Egyptian border as the the principal target area and into what I said are effectively concentration camps scattered mostly around around the south. Now the NetZahim corridor has been a key part of Israel's plan of conquest of Gaza. It's established in a fortified positions there. It is a hub of Israeli occupation force, military activity. Obviously it is a part of the central part of the infrastructure of the destruction from the destruction of Gaza and its deep population. So in the NetZahim corridor you already had a pre-established area of control by Israeli occupation forces. So it's a logical place to have a hub also for the GHF part of their plans. You've got, there's an effort to try to create a concentration point, a concentration camp for survivors from the north and the center of Gaza there so you can prepare them for removal one way or another and in doing so help to do populate the north and the center. It's also I think a way station for this effort between the north and the center on the one hand and the south where the major concentrations are taken place on the other and it could potentially it's just south of Gaza City where the main port area is in Gaza could also be used for ethnic cleansing via sea routes as well. That speculation but there's a certain logic to that particular location being a little bit closer to the north to the center and to the sea area. So you see a push which is mostly southward but some of it is southward and west ward from the sea as well and I think the NetZahim location is a part of that plan. Right well I'm a deep population that's a morally terrifying note to end on but Craig McIber thank you so very much for joining us on the Guns for Higher Podcast and of course for the human rights work that you've devoted your career to. Thank you. Thank you Alia good to be here. And thank you for listening. We're going to continue just rolling forward and bringing you episodes on an ad hoc basis. Up to that end I will drop a conversation with John Leckner soon. In the meantime so many of you out there are listening and getting in touch so it would be great to continue with the podcast regularly and to bring you a full season three. So if you're interested in partnering with or sponsoring the podcast do please drop me a line. Either way I'll be back soon. Goodbye. [Music]