The self-inflicted massacre at Shijaiyah
July 31, 2023 by Thomas Wictor
I decided to not wait until the Israel Defense Forces released an official statement about what happened in the Shijaiyah neighborhood of Gaza City on July 30, 2014. You’ll see for yourself that the self-inflicted massacre at Shijaiyah should never have occurred. Hamas is entirely to blame.
Every news outlet on the planet is calling this “an air strike on a crowded/busy market street” and a deliberate followup attack on the ambulances that came to help. Both accusations are entirely bogus.
A short, low-quality video shows the first “strike.”
The photojournalist in the blue helmet is a twenty-three-year-old Palestinian man named Rami Rayan. He was one of the seventeen killed. Initially it looks as though a bomb or missile hit, but that isn’t the case.
This longer video shows the mayhem. There are some fairly gruesome scenes, as well as the sounds of fourteen explosions.
At 3:54 in that video, a bearded man goes into a long diatribe over the body of Rami Rayan. I could make out the word “Amriki,” so he’s blaming the US.
The state of reporting from Gaza is so abysmal due to the Hamas death threats against journalists that it took me hours to find out what had really happened. I pretty much knew, but I wanted to present ironclad corroborating evidence so that BagNews or Ali Gharib wouldn’t be able to dismiss this post as the mere ravings of a man who sees the ghost of his dead cat.
Just about every single news story says “The Israelis bombed a crowded market street in Shijaiyah” or “a busy market street in Shijaiyah” during a four-hour truce. Here’s a typical recounting of events.
‘Bloodbath’ as Gaza market hit by deadly strikes
Witnesses at the Shijaiyah market said a series of strikes hit at short intervals whilst people were shopping during the partial ceasefire announced by the Israeli military earlier today.
The military have not commented on the strikes.
The area next to a petrol station was hit and a fire engulfed the densely populated area near the market. Then more strikes hit the market directly, according to local reports.
It’s only after much, much, much searching that one finds three crucial details omitted from the overwhelming majority of the stories.
2. The open-air market was closed at the time, therefore the Palestinian assertion that it was crowded or busy with shoppers is a lie. Listen to the narrator at :30 in the video. You can see with your own eyes that this isn’t a crowded or busy market, nor were there 160 wounded.
Update
Imagine that! After I posted this piece, the Telegraph changed the voice over, omitting the observation that the open-air market was closed. That doesn’t matter. Look at the empty lot for yourself: NO VENDERS, NO CROWDS. There was NO STRIKE ON A CROWDED MARKET. I wonder if Hamas threatened the Telegraph’s reporters in Gaza?
What a surreal experience. As I was looking for new corroboration that the market was closed, articles were changing between the moment I clicked the link and the page opened. It was like the Michael Douglas movie Disclosure, where he’s inside the virtual computer, and the files are disappearing before his eyes. The Telegraph’s cached articles have been removed, so somebody thought it was really important to conceal the fact that the market was closed.
Using Google Translate, I tried every language, including Arabic. Finally I began searching for specific sentences. None of them gave me any results. The information that the Shijaiyah market was closed on July 30, 2014, had been entirely scrubbed from the Internet.
Except…for in one YouTube video, which I found by searching the sentence “The market was not open at the time.”
Took a screen shot too, just in case ITN decides to do what every other major press outlet has done.
Could you ask for better proof of media dishonesty and pro-Hamas bias? Seriously: See if you can find a report admitting that the market was EMPTY at the time. Here’s what the lying, Jew-hating Belfast Telegraph wrote.
No, you bastards. The market was not crowded. It was EMPTY—the opposite of crowded—because it was CLOSED. Now that we’ve put the “busy marketplace” lie to rest, we can move on. See, this is why I hate journalists. They’re going back and stealth-editing their stories to make them comport to Hamas’s narrative. Incredible. They actually love terrorists.
3. The air strike hit a warehouse, causing the fire visible in the videos. Here’s a screen shot just in case.
Also, as that soon-to-be disappeared snippet says, Hamas had ignored the ceasefire, shooting twenty-seven rockets into Israel during those four hours.
With this information in hand, watch a somewhat different version of the longer video.
Notice that there is no damage to the ambulances. It this were a direct hit with a missile or bomb, the ambulances would be peppered with shrapnel holes. The explosion took place right behind one of three ambulances. I’ve isolated this frame from the first video in the post. It’s poor quality, but this puff of black smoke—marked with a green arrow—is the moment Rami Rayan was killed.
As you can see, there is absolutely no shrapnel damage to the wall or the ambulances, and there’s no impact crater.
Note, however, the black smudges on the lower wall. I’ll get to those later.
People turned on a water faucet and hosed down the scene. Why did they do that? I’ll tell you in a minute. Now go back to the third video above and observe that virtually every victim was hit in the foot, ankle, or lower body. There’s no Israeli munition that causes such a wound pattern. However, the pressure-cooker bombs that terrorists used at the Boston Marathon produced similar injuries. Keep that in mind. Explosives that go off on the ground and send a pressure wave out to the sides will hurt your lower limbs. Aerial munitions will hurt all of you.
A self-inflicted massacre
That burning warehouse was full of Hamas rockets. The series of concussions you hear are secondary explosions, not the primary explosions of aerial munitions. When you bomb a warehouse full of fueled rockets, each rocket will explode separately. What happened was the empty marketplace next to the burning warehouse became the set for a Pallywood production, but then the rockets started exploding, killing and maiming the people who tried to exploit this situation.
I know they’re secondary explosions because they’re causing no destruction. No fountains of earth or clouds of dust appear with each loud BOOM! And the Palestinians also sent out a photo of what they called an “unexploded Israeli missile” from this incident.
It’s not. The size would mean that it was an MK-84 2000-lb. general-purpose bomb, but those have rolled-steel, machined casings. This “munition” has a welded-on nose cone. You can clearly see the the weld line, part of it in white. Therefore it’s not Israeli. It’s a prop for sympathetic or coerced photographers.
UPDATE
A reader tipped me off that a nearly identical photo was published on July 14, 2014.
That means this object has nothing whatsoever to do with the events of July 30, 2014. Note the spurious caption. Great work, Getty Images!
This next bit of video is very gruesome, but it shows that I’m right. You don’t have to watch it because I’ve isolated the relevant evidence that this damage was caused by Hamas rockets exploding. Read the description below the video first.
It contains footage of a man whose face, arms, torso, and legs are burned black. If you click the image, it’s pixelated so that you can’t see the terrible details.
His legs are also broken. The only thing that could’ve done all that was an exploding rocket that smashed into him and doused him in burning fuel.
WARNING! WARNING! CONJECTURE AHEAD!
He has rolled trouser legs, indicating that he’s a Salafist Wahabbist. He may be a Hamas operative who was blown out of the warehouse and across the street.
Here’s more evidence that part of a burning rocket shooting along the wall wreaked all that havoc. First, we see the body of Rami Rayan, marked with the green arrow.
We’re told that he was killed by an aerial munition, but the paramedic sitting up next to him is alive. Also, look at all the shoes lying around, and remember that most people were injured in the feet, ankles, shins, and lower body.
Next, the fronts of the two ambulances.
Why would the fronts be shattered if the air strike happened behind the ambulances, as the videos show? Here’s the answer, which also explains why the bystanders turned on the water. Look at the smoke stains and holes in the wall, marked with a red arrow.
They’re from a Hamas rocket fuel tank. Because it was a tank, it contained no shrapnel. The fuel ignited in the warehouse, causing the tank to shoot like a torpedo across the street. It struck and killed Rami Rayan, breaking his legs. Please forgive the awful image, but it proves that I’m right. He has no shrapnel injuries, only badly broken legs.
The fuel tank then exploded on the ground in the corner of the courtyard, blowing off everybody’s shoes and injuring them in the lower extremities. It turned each stone and piece of trash into a low-flying projectile.
All the videos to which I’ve linked are heavily edited to persuade viewers that this was an air strike on ambulances, but when the people trying to deceive you don’t know about military or technical matters, they make mistakes.
One of the secondary explosions was caught on film, at 2:03. You can hear the explosion and see the puff of smoke from the rocket blowing up.
So: the open-air market was closed, not crowded or busy. Israel had declared a ceasefire that did not include Shijaiyah, because Hamas kept firing rockets from that neighborhood. The Israelis struck a warehouse, not the market. Their intelligence was good; the fourteen secondary explosions show that the warehouse was full of rockets. The Palestinians showed up to create propaganda. They brought ambulances and frantic paramedics, but their inhuman leaders hadn’t told them that the warehouse was a giant bomb waiting to go off.
The rockets exploded, Hamas got its faked atrocity video, and the stenographers of the western media dutifully wrote what they were told.
Does it matter to anybody that the whole thing is a lie from top to bottom?
Update
The Telegraph article has very high-quality video that allowed me to garner further proof that this was a self-inflicted massacre.
First, you can see Rami Rayan a second before his death. He’s marked with the green arrow.
The moment the explosion happens, every person nearby has his feet knocked out from under him.
All those men are airborne, their legs having been hit with and forced backward by a pressure wave only a few inches above the ground. The first explosion sounds like a pulse-jet engine: preh-keh-ka-boom. That’s the noise of a large, hard object clattering down the cinder-block wall.
It was an exploding Hamas rocket fuel tank that killed and injured these people. I have no doubt.
Update Two
I’ve been asked a very reasonable question of how the rocket fuel tank could have hit the men if they were standing behind a wall. In this video a firework changes direction in midair and goes from up to down and then left to right almost instantly. It happens at 0:11.
These four frames are taken from less than one second of video.
The Hamas rocket fuel tank would’ve been completely out of control and moving at extremely high speed. It likely had one hole in it, and that hole acted as an exhaust nozzle.
Imagine a bowling bowl with a jet engine in it, rolling along the ground. It could go in any direction.
It had to be a tank for liquid propellant.
The Fajr-5 rocket uses liquid propellant. In the videos, the injuries to the lower body show that there was no warhead. This was not a complete rocket. By the time the fuel tank hit the closed market, most of the propellant had already burned. However, the vapor left inside was released when the tank ruptured against the wall. The vapor mixed with atmospheric air and created the explosion you saw. In effect the tank became a fuel-air bomb.
My theory in two sentences: The Hamas rocket fuel tank flew out of the warehouse—spinning, cartwheeling, and rotating on every axis. Because burning fuel sprayed out of only one hole, the tank made a sharp left turn into the almost-empty marketplace, flying the along the wall and into the corner of the lot, where it exploded.
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