Anthony Aguilar, a retired U.S. special forces veteran who recently returned from Gaza, recounted the horrific story of a child shot dead at an aid distribution site just moments after thanking Aguilar for the food he helped provide.

Aguilar – who served the US Armed Forces for twenty five years, has been deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star – said he witnessed the incident while working as a sub-contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an organization backed by the United States and Israel to replace the United Nations efforts to provide aid to Gaza, in an operation that independent observers have described as dangerous and ineffective.

In an interview with UnXeptable – an organization which describes itself as “a grassroots movement launched by a group of Israelis expats for saving Israeli democracy” — Aguilar detailed the atrocities he said he witnessed while working for the organization.

This little boy, his name is Amir. And he was standing, he was with the crowd… He walks over to me and he and he puts out his hand. And at first I thought like that he that he wanted more food or something.

And I felt bad because I didn’t have anything. But I was like, “Oh, I have I have nothing.” And he and he puts out his hand. And so I beckoned him to come to me. I said, you know “come here.” And he reaches out and he holds my hand and he kisses my hand. He kisses my hand and he says, “Shukran.”

“Shukran” is the Arabic word for “thank you.”

“You can see in this picture that this little boy is not wearing shoes. His clothes are falling off of him because he’s so skinny,” Aguilar continued. “This little boy from where he came from walked 12 kilometers to get there. Just to get there. 12 kilometers. Look at this boy. And when he got there, he thanked us for the remnants and the small crumbs that he got.”

Aguilar described what happened next:

And he sets his food down and he places his hands on my face on the side of my face on my cheeks. These frail skeleton emaciated hands, dirty. And he puts them on my face and he kissed me. He kissed me and he said, “Thank you” in English. Thank you. And he collected his items and he walked back to the group and then he was shot at with pepper spray and tear gas and stun grenades and bullets shot at his feet and in the air and he runs away scared.

Aguilar said Amir was then shot, by Israeli soldiers, along with others attempting to get food.

“Human beings are dropping to the ground and getting shot. Amir was one of them. Amir walked 12 kilometers to get food, got nothing but scraps, thanked us for it, and died. That’s what we’re doing.”

Aguilar has been speaking out about the actions of the GHF and IDF in Gaza. In an interview with the BBC, he said his “most frank assessment” is that the aid distribution was “criminal.”

“In my entire career, I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population,” he said. “I have never witnessed that in all the places that I have been deployed to war, until I was in Gaza — at the hands of IDF and US contractors.”

In response to Aguilar’s interview with the BBC, the IDF and GHF denied his claims.