english → Japanese transcript

This young little boy, his name is Amir. I know that because when he walked over from the crowd of people, he walked toward me. There was two of us standing there, two UG Solutions guards standing in that area, and he was walking towards us and we thought maybe he was hurt or maybe he was asking for some more food because all he had in his arms was a small bag of rice, half a bag of flour,

some lentils that he had picked up from the ground, he didn't have much. And we thought maybe he was asking for more food or maybe he was hurt and we notioned him over and he came up and he extends his right hand at us and so I kind of walked up to him and waved him over and the guy standing next to me, this young boy, holds his hand and he kisses it and then he comes to me and he holds my hand and he kisses it.

In Arab culture, that is a very significant sign of respect. That's not something that should be taken lightly or something that should be, that's a big sign of respect. And we were taken aback by that. The gentleman that was standing next to me was also a military veteran, combat veteran,

so he's been to Afghanistan, Iraq, and he was moved by it, he was touched, I was touched. And as he was standing there, we were both looking at him and he was very emaciated, he had no shoes on, his pants were tattered, he had kind of a rope or string holding his pants up, filthy, probably hasn't bathed in months, probably hasn't eaten in days. And oh by the way, when they walk 8-12 kilometers to get to these sites, the Gaza Humanitarian

Foundation mechanism provides no water, zero, not a single bottle, because it's too expensive. Distributing water weighs so much that it breaks down the profit per cost per truck. That's a fact, because I asked why, and I was given a lesson in it, this is why, it's too expensive, so we give them no water. All of their food, by the way, requires water to cook it, rice, lentils, beans, flour, you

gotta have water. So what we're giving them, I don't know how they're eating it, but he comes, he's standing there and I put my arm on his left shoulder, and I look at him and I can feel the bones in his shoulder, I can feel the weakness in his arm, I can feel the vulnerability, I can feel the desperation.

And I look at him, and I got down on my knees, I'm looking at him in the eyes, and then I say to him, I said, people care, America cares, you're not gonna be forgotten, people in the world care. And he doesn't speak English, and I don't speak Arabic, but the connection we had in looking at each other, he felt like, he felt for the first time in a long time that there

was someone that cared. And I got down on a knee, and he came to his level, and the items he had in his hand, he sets them down on the ground, and he raises his hands, and they're small, fragile, you can see bones, just the bones of the skin, and he places his hands on my face, and he kissed me, and he looked at me in the eyes, and he said, thank you, he said it in English,

thank you. People are starving in Gaza, people are dying in Gaza, these children that are starving and dying, these children, you know, they look like everyday Americans, this child is picking up noodles off the ground with his bare hands because there was no food left, so he's picking up noodles to put into his backpack.

Amir goes back to the main group, and he goes out the exit, we had a very strict protocol that they come in a certain way, get the aid, and then they go out a certain way. From the way they came in, it takes them back to the way they came in, the exit takes them back that same way, so they enter from the Morag corridor, they go south, they go through the station, they exit, and they go north to the Morag corridor, so coming in and going

out, they're tied right back into the active combat zone. Site number two particularly is a little bit different than the other sites because it's in between site one and two, and there's an IDF combat outpost just off the corner of SDS-2, so there's a berm that lines that road going out. So if people are leaving the exit and someone is on the east side of the berm shooting into

the crowd over here, you can't see what's on the other side of that berm because of the obscuration, the field of fire. So the IDF are shooting at the crowd that's leaving, as the crowd left and they would hit the Morag corridor to go west, the IDF would shoot at them, shoot at their feet, shoot over their head, we would shoot at them, shoot at their feet, shoot over their head,

shoot into the air. And the bullets start hitting off the ground. There's video of this, it's on the BBC video, hitting off the ground, see dirt flying up, and I was still on the site, I was below the berm, it was the second time we had done distribution, so when I heard the gunfire kick off, the automatic machine gun fire, I thought we were

under attack, I thought something had happened. So I ran up to the southern berm and I laid down to take cover, you know, I'm observing and I'm looking and I see the shooting keep going on by just the, and Palestinians dropping on the side of the road. So Amir didn't make it home.

He walked 12 kilometers to get some food, picked up scraps off the ground, and that's all that was left, because the 8-minute mayhem took all of the food, and by the time he got there walking with no shoes, hungry and tired. The only thing left for him was to pick up some remnants off the ground. And when he left, he was killed by the IDF. Why? Because they lack discipline, they lack standards, and they lack basic human decency.