U.S. contractors shot Gaza aid seekers. Laws can reach them, but enforcement stalls while the killing continues.
Which courtroom claims a shooter when he pulls the trigger for a private company instead of a flag? That question returned to Rafah this month after the Associated Press (AP) authenticated a video of khaki-clad, U.S.-trained contractors working for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) alongside Israeli forces at GHF checkpoints and discharging M-4-style weapons first above, then into, dense food-aid queues. AP’s geolocation places the clips inside Rafah; audio forensics identify machine-gun fire, and a helmet-camera clip preserves a celebratory “Hell, yeah!” shouted as the final burst ends. Additional footage verified by Al Jazeera on July 10 shows three Israeli soldiers pepper-spraying men, women, and children at the GHF hub.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, more than 1,700 individuals have been killed while trying to obtain food since the new aid distribution system became functional. The United Nations has boycotted the project—which it has deemed a “failure”—and refused GHF partnership offers, calling it “inherently unsafe.” Two former members of the guard detail, speaking under U.S. whistleblower protection, said that stun grenades, pepper spray, and occasional live fire have become “standard crowd-control practice.” GHF and the Israel Defense Forces have denied causing any “serious injuries.” This denial, however, must contend with images of at least one fatality: a woman slumped in a donkey cart, her skull apparently lacerated by grenade fragments.
The scene resurrects the “Blackwater question” with a vengeance: When the shooter wears a company logo instead of a flag, whose courtroom has jurisdiction? In 2007, Laura Dickinson warned that the Nisour Square massacre in Iraq—conducted at the hands of Blackwater contractors—had exposed “an uneven latticework” of accountability for private security contractors. Eighteen years since, that once-uneven latticework has been welded into a three-bar cage consisting of the expanded the War Crimes Act, a clarified Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, and grant-linked false claims liability, exposing grantees to suits for misusing or misrepresenting mandated compliance. As a result, Gaza shooters now face a jurisdictional framework Blackwater could never escape.
How U.S. Law Reaches Rafah
Every American contractor who sets foot in a conflict zone operates inside a five-part rulebook drawn from the Geneva and Hague conventions, customary humanitarian law, and a suite of modern U.S. statutes: (1) civilians are never lawful targets under the laws of war; (2) the War Crimes Act and other extraterritorial U.S. statutes travel with them; (3) every shot must stay within the narrow terms of the State Department export license that delivered the weapon; (4) federal grant and procurement compliance rules apply in full; and (5) any breach opens the door to civil liability back home in U.S. courts. What follows unpacks each duty and traces how they moor every round fired at a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation checkpoint to American statutes, judges, and budgets.
International humanitarian law shields civilians from attack, yet Article 51(3) of Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions withdraws civilian immunity “for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.” By firing live ammunition at unarmed civilians, the contractors almost certainly commit the war crime of intentionally attacking civilians. If that gunfire furthers a party’s military aims, it also constitutes “direct participation in hostilities,” temporarily stripping the shooters of civilian immunity while the gunfire lasts.
The War Crimes Act
Accountability, however, depends on enforcement, and international courts have struggled to translate clear legal prohibitions into timely prosecutions. However, U.S. statutes leave no comparable vacuum. In 1996, Congress criminalized grave-breach conduct, but after the Nisour Square massacre, critics noted that the War Crimes Act left several major nationality and venue loopholes, limiting prosecution to cases with a U.S. victim or perpetrator and to certain locations, thus allowing some overseas contractor abuses to fall outside U.S. jurisdiction. Those gaps closed, however, in 2023 when the Justice for Victims of War Crimes Act amended the War Crimes Act to cover any U.S. national, or any offender later found in the United States, “inside or outside” U.S. territory.
After the 2023 amendment, a U.S. passport, or even a layover on U.S. soil, is enough to give federal courts jurisdiction over Rafah gunfire. GHF’s armed perimeter is supplied by UG Solutions, a North Carolina firm recruiting former Delta Force and Special Forces operators. One May posting sought contractors “skilled in unconventional warfare” and comfortable with “belt-fed machine guns.” Safe Reach Solutions, allegedly led by a former CIA covert-action chief, installs camera networks and runs on-shore logistics; both companies are U.S. entities and both are cited in GHF public documents. Because these are U.S. companies, staffed largely by former American military personnel, any alleged abuses at GHF checkpoints are not just a matter of foreign policy; they are actionable under U.S. law. The shooters’ passports, corporate registrations, and funding streams all lead back to U.S. jurisdiction, meaning that the legal trail from Gaza runs directly to American courtrooms.
Federal Funding
GHF’s work is underwritten by a $30 million U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) grant approved by the White House on June 26 and flagged as a “high-priority” directive. While UG Solutions guards and Safe Reach Solutions managers might collect their paychecks from GHF, not the U.S. Treasury Department, that cash still begins as federal dollars that flow through the foundation and land—one subcontract later—in the hands of soldiers firing weapons outside Rafah. According to Reuters, the State Department was reportedly considering an additional $500 million grant to GHF. It’s likely that the June 26 grant of $30 million was only the beginning.
On July 1, the Trump administration officially dismantled USAID. But even though the agency disappeared, its grants did not: The agency’s uniform guidance in 2 C.F.R. part 200 migrated to the State Department, which as a result now manages the agency’s grants. Section 200.206 of the guidance still obliges every grants officer to perform an integrity-and-financial-risk review before sending money abroad, and, where concerns exist, agencies may impose “specific conditions” (often described in agency practice as “high-risk” designations). Because two Tier 1 banks (UBS and Goldman Sachs) declined to open a Swiss account for GHF after a compliance screening, USAID grants officers performing the pre-award risk review had ample reason to treat the award as high risk and to add specific conditions under § 200.208, such as requiring prior written approval for any armed-security subcontracts and enhanced incident reporting and subrecipient monitoring.
Instead, the State Department wired the first $30 million to GHF and, extraordinarily, waived the audit that USAID once treated as standard. This wasn’t a skip of the pre-award risk review under § 200.206; it was a waiver of the post-award audit/extra vetting package that USAID historically required for first-time or foreign recipients (for example, recipient-contracted financial audits). That waiver eases oversight but does not extinguish statutory exposure: Any grant that remains an expenditure of appropriated funds under 31 U.S.C. § 6306 and the False Claims Act can still impose treble damages if the recipient knowingly submits material misrepresentations about performance—although reduced audit paperwork may make such a case harder, not impossible, to prove. Each bullet that contradicts the grant’s “humanitarian” purpose is a data point for a whistleblower complaint, making it chargeable in a U.S. district court.
Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act
The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) supplies another hook. For contractors who are not working directly for the Defense Department, MEJA reaches felonies committed “while employed by or accompanying the Armed Forces” and “supporting the mission of the Department of Defense overseas.” Prosecutors might contend that by providing perimeter firepower and real-time surveillance for a U.S.-financed humanitarian operation in an active war zone, UG Solutions and Safe Reach indirectly support broader U.S. regional and force-protection objectives, thus satisfying the statute.
The only close precedent—the Blackwater prosecutions the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld in United States v. Slough—involved contractors protecting U.S. diplomats during a Defense Department-designated contingency operation in Iraq. Gaza lacks such a formally linked Defense mission, so extending MEJA here would be novel and litigiously uncertain. If that hook proves too narrow, prosecutors could still rely on the War Crimes Act or other extraterritorial statutes; whether any of them are invoked will turn on institutional will.
Defense Trade Controls
The hardware tells a similar story. If the rifles, optics, or encrypted radios deployed at GHF checkpoints are U.S.-origin, or if any U.S. person arranged their transfer, they qualify as “defense articles” under International Traffic in Arms Regulations. The State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) export approvals for private-security details (usually DSP-5 licences) carry provisos that confine the weapons to purely defensive, personal and site protection roles; they do not authorize crowd-control or other offensive fire. One offensive burst that breaches a license proviso voids the license and retroactively converts the shipment into an unlawful export under 22 U.S.C. § 2778. Civil fines can exceed $1.27 million per violation, and criminal penalties can reach up to 20 years. The DDTCs can also sign a “debarment” order at any point that freezes UG Solutions and Safe Reach out of the export market—no hearing required.
Civil and Contractual Pressure Points
Contractors’ duties (that is, spare civilians, heed extraterritorial U.S. crimes statutes, fire only within the export-license terms, and meet grant and contract compliance clauses) give injured parties multiple levers for legal action. The task now is to pull them.
If government actors hesitate, civil plaintiffs do not have to. The Alien Tort Statute (ATS) allows non-U.S. nationals to sue in federal court for torts that violate a “specific, universal, and obligatory” norm of international law. Although the Supreme Court’s 2018 Jesner v. Arab Bank decision blocked ATS suits against foreign corporations, it left domestic U.S. companies—such as UG Solutions or Safe Reach—fully exposed. That means every family bereaved at a GHF checkpoint has standing to bring an ATS claim, but to prevail they must show (a) that the shooting violates a “specific, universal, and obligatory” norm—such as the prohibition on deliberately attacking civilians, (b) that the U.S. contractors carried out or knowingly aided that act, and (c) that the case “touches and concerns” the United States with sufficient force under Kiobel v. Shell (for example, U.S. corporate defendants, financing, or command decisions). Blackwater’s civil docket offers precedent of the ATS in action. In Al-Quraishi v. L-3 Services, plaintiffs sued a U.S. contractor under the ATS for torture, cruel treatment, and war crimes. The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland firmly rejected every immunity defense (sovereign, combatant-activities, and political-question), holding that domestic corporate defendants can be liable under the ATS for intentional abuses abroad. Those surviving ATS counts, paired with strong U.S. nexus factors, carried the case through discovery and ultimately compelled a multimillion-dollar settlement. The lesson is straightforward: ATS provides a viable path to accountability and remedy for family members of civilians killed at a GHF checkpoint that can plead a recognized war-crimes norm, corporate U.S. defendants, and sufficient U.S. connections.
Civil remedies extend beyond the ATS. Individual supervisors who directed or condoned the gunfire could be sued under the Torture Victim Protection Act. Various theories have produced verdicts against foreign commanders in Cabello Barrueto, Chávez v. Carranza, and Yousuf v. Samantar. And if any U.S. nationals were struck, plaintiffs might frame an Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) claim, pointing to decisions like Atchley v. AstraZeneca and Kaplan v. Lebanese Canadian Bank, which allow U.S. companies to face ATA liability when they knowingly assist violence that qualifies as international terrorism.
Given how difficult it is to prove extrajudicial killing in civil court, the administrative lever is not just faster; it is the likeliest route to real-world accountability. Federal Acquisition Regulation Subpart 9.4 authorizes immediate suspension where “adequate evidence” suggests a violation of federal criminal law in connection with contract performance, no conviction necessary. Authenticated video, whistleblower affidavits, and the same potential war crimes and export-control violations outlined meet that threshold. In 2008, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency posted IBM on the government-wide exclusion list—thus barring the company from seeking new federal contracts—the same day it flagged procurement-ethics concerns; the notice itself states the action was taken “based on an indictment or other adequate evidence.” IBM learned of the freeze only after outside callers spotted the listing, and within a single business day the firm was locked out of every new federal contract. A comparable notice would sideline UG Solutions and Safe Reach from embassy security, training ranges, even janitorial subcontracts, namely, federal revenue streams they cannot forgo.
The Enforcement Stall
Why hasn’t enforcement caught up yet? Decisions to investigate, prosecute, suspend, or debar sit with agencies that have to balance limited staff and many competing priorities. The State Department classifies the $30 million GHF grant as “high‑priority,” and Justice Department experience shows that complicated, overseas cases, especially those touching classified partners often progress slowly, while investigators gather evidence and secure witnesses.
Opening fire on civilians seeking aid violates the laws of war. Compared with 2007, today’s statutes reach further and the factual record is clearer, yet the Blackwater timeline serves as a reminder that litigation alone can be protracted and uncertain. Speed and leverage lie elsewhere: Grant managers can reopen the risk file and tighten conditions; DDTC staff can draft a debarment order before lunch; suspension-and-debarment officials can issue a show-cause letter that shuts the federal spigot overnight. Cutting off funds can stop the wrongdoing without new legislation or high‑level sign‑off. The compliance architecture built after Nisour Square exists precisely for moments like Rafah.
– Safia is a researcher at the Quincy Institute and third-year Columbia Law student with expertise in Middle East policy, conflict studies, and international human rights law. Published courtesy of Lawfare.
