Thomas Wictor

Today several people asked me to look at a Danish video showing an aerial view of the destruction in Shijaiyah, a neighborhood of Gaza City. The footage is edited to make it seem as though the entire area was flattened, but the damage was actually confined to two small areas. Just for fun I looked up “Battle of Shuja’iyya” on Wikipedia. It may as well have been written by Hamas.

The Danish video is basically like this one, but the same location was filmed seven or eight times, from different angles.

Shijaiyah—spelled at least a dozen ways—was an important military target.

Shejaiyya is in effect a military compound prepared for fighting, which is planted in the heart of the civilian population. All of the assets that are important for the terror organizations are there: welding workshops for manufacturing rockets, labs for making explosives, rocket warehouses, hidden rocket launchers, command centers, and a tunnel system that enables the terrorists to move between these facilities quickly without being concerned about getting hit from the air. There are also entrances to tunnels that lead into Israel.

Shejaiyya’s location makes it preferable in the context of distance and as an observation point – for shooting towards the local surroundings as well as towards the Tel Aviv area and northwards. This is why it’s not surprising that Hamas and Jihad decided to fight for Shejaiyya, and they had time to prepare for such fighting.

This is how the IDF illustrated it.

Wikipedia’s article about the Battle of Shijaiyah is so full of lies that it’s useful only for establishing the time frame. The very first sentence is wrong.

The Battle of Shuja’iyya, also known as Shejaiya massacre was a battle in the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict between Israel Defense Forces and Hamas military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, on 20 July 2023 in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood of Gaza City, in the Gaza Strip.

It’s known as a massacre among terrorists, their supporters, idiots, and corrupt “human rights” organizations, but nobody with a functioning brain calls it that. Also, the battle was between the IDF, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, and the al-Quds Brigades of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Five days before the battle, Israel began warning the residents of Shijaiyah to leave.

Here’s what Wikipedia says.

According to Amnesty International, the UNRWA shelter facilities were overflowing and many of the residents had nowhere to go.

And yet on July 20—when the IDF began its incursion—35,000 of the 100,000 residents fled. If there was nowhere to go, where did they go?

The assault on Shuja’iyya, involving a combination of F-16, tank and mortar fire, began at 11 pm on 19 July.

No. The assault began with the IDF firing artillery into open areas around the neighborhood to warn the residents that battle was imminent. There were no F-16 bombing runs or mortar barrages. Brigadier General Roy Riftin is commander of the Israeli Artillery Corps. He explains what happened.

“Remember, Shuja’iya was supposed to be evacuated. Ditto Beit Hanoun. A normal army would firstly prepare the area well with [artillery] saturation fire before allowing its forces to enter.

“But we first entered our forces, determined which areas were threatening them, and then implemented our fire,” Riftin said.

“It’s a different approach that comes at a cost of tremendous work and added risk to our people, but that’s what we did. No one can be more righteous than that.”

Back to Wikipedia.

The conclusion of U.S. military experts interviewed by Mark Perry was that the IDF did not target Hamas sites specifically, simply to collapse Hamas tunnels, but rather laid down a ‘walking barrage’ to ‘crater the neighbourhood’ instead of using suppressive fire to protect their forward troops, a strategy they deemed ‘indefensible’.

That’s just a flat-out lie. Mark Perry’s article is a fantasy. All you have to do is look at that video I posted above. The neighborhood isn’t “cratered,” and why would the IDF want to create a moonscape impossible for its armored personnel carriers to traverse? Also, when you blow up buildings, they fall down and make giant piles of rubble. Explain why the Israelis would want to build their own obstacle course. And walking barrages haven’t been used since World War II. The morons who spoke to Mark Perry have been watching too many movies.

As for the IDF not targeting specific Hamas sites, that’s another lie.

The Artillery Corps has unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that feed real-time footage into the Tzayad network, the Digital Army Program that shows commanders where all their own units and the enemy are. Each is assigned a twelve-digit coordinate. Artillery UAVs identify hostile positions, and the locations are given to the howitzers. Nobody’s firing blindly.

On to another pathetic untruth quoted by Wikipedia.

An unnamed American military officer told Al Jazeera that, according to Pentagon reports of the IDF’s actions on the 21st, some 258 artillery pieces deployed by 11 Israeli artillery battalions fired around 7,000 high explosive shells into Shuja’iyya, including 4,800 shells in a 7 hour period.

Unnamed military officer. That’s because he’s in charge of cleaning latrines. The IDF used three battalions of M109 Doher 155mm self-propelled howitzers.

The photo above shows two platoons of Dohers—six guns in total. Two platoons make up one battery, and there are three batteries in a battalion. That’s eighteen guns per battalion. If three battalions fired on Shijaiyah, we’re talking fifty-four guns, not 258. Also, the artillery fired a total of 600 high-explosive shells over a twenty-minute period.

The Wikipedia article says 7000 shells, and it also says this.

So which is it, 600 or 7000? And Israeli aircraft bomb from above? That implies that some aircraft bomb from beneath the earth.

Compare the IDF intelligence map on the left to the UN damage-assessment map on the right.

I count about 140 bunkers, thirty-seven combat posts, and eleven tunnels. The UN map is worthless because it doesn’t tell us who destroyed or damaged the buildings. Even so, it shows us that the Israelis engaged in precision targeting, not the “indiscriminate fire” that we heard so much about.

Wikipedia.

Initially the attack, lead[sic] by the Golani Brigade, encountered little resistance, until late on Saturday Hamas units, emerged from tunnels, engaged and put up stiff resistance, surprising the Israelis with their capacity to take on armoured units.

No. The assault didn’t include armored units. Tanks of the 188th Armored Brigade were sent in only after the giant ambush that took place at 1:00 a.m.

More Wikipedia.

Salem Shamaly (22), a grocer at the local market who attempted to find missing family by returning to the neighbourhood during the two-hour ceasefire at 3:30pm that day, was shot three times, while calling out the names of family members, after crossing the imaginary red line Israeli soldiers are reported to have drawn to kill anyone coming close to their positions.

Yes, the poor martyr Salem Shamaly, shot twice on the front of his body but left with no wounds.

His family first identified his body in a hospital morgue for NBC News and later told Max Blumenthal that they collected the corpse from the rubble themselves.

Wikipedia.

At least 65 Palestinians, including at least 17 children, 14 women and 4 elderly were killed and 288 Palestinians were wounded according to Shifa hospital’s director, Naser Tattar.

Well, the International Middle East Media Center lists seventy-one dead, thirty of whom are military-aged males. The ages of several males are not given. At least one man—Ali Mohammad Hasan Skafi—was a terrorist of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad al-Quds Brigades.

I’m guessing that all nine of the Skafi men killed in Shijaiyah on July 20, 2104, were terrorists. We know that five were. There are eight boys between the ages of nine and sixteen listed here as having been killed in Shijaiyah on July 20; in the nine-to-seventeen age cohort, twice as many Gazan boys died as girls. My view is that most of the dead boys were combatants. So many seven- and eight-year-old boys were killed that I believe that they were also assigned combat roles.

And now I’m wondering how many of the dead girls were fighters too.

Wikipedia was a great idea, but it relied on people being honest.

When it comes to Israel and Jews, it seems that the world is pathologically incapable of telling the truth.