Thomas Wictor

There’s a movie about the Bakr boys online, called Operation Four Little Martyrs. Hamas murdered Ismail Bakr, Mohammed Bakr, Ahed Bakr, and Zakaria Bakr as military deception (MILDEC). On July 16, 2014, the world was told that the IDF had killed the boys, but that’s a lie.

The movie is very poor. It has too many technical problems, and it’s too difficult to follow. However, the Israeli filmmaker released it even though I thought I’d made it clear to him that I didn’t want to be associated with this squandered opportunity. I’ve given the Bakr boys material to a man in Los Angeles in my third and final attempt to have this film made.

Tonight the Israeli contacted me and said that I’d never asked him to take my name off the movie. Well, I’d told him that I wanted nothing to do with the film, and that it was not mine. It was his. When he asked what he should do with it, I said that he could do whatever he wanted with it. It didn’t occur to me to say specifically that he had to take my name off of it if he released it. I’d backed out of the project, completely disavowed the film, and said I didn’t want to be connected to it. My assumption was that it would never see the light of day.

Did you know that Henry Kissinger has a brother named Walter? That’s him on the right.

Walter Kissinger speaks unaccented American English. He was once asked why Henry has such a thick German accent.

“Because Henry doesn’t listen,” Walter said.

The Israeli filmmaker simply refused to listen to me. Over a period of five months, I explained the story at least 200 times, but he would not accept what I was saying. He’s remaining anonymous, so there was no need for him to understand. All he had to do was make the movie that I paid him to make. However, he insisted that I repeat myself over and over. After he said he understood, he would then go back to the beginning and say I had to explain it again in order to “maintain my credibility.”

After giving it a lot of thought, I can’t say why he released the film. When I complained about the finished movie, the filmmaker blamed his editor and me. He made three versions of the film, and then I finally told him that it was impossible for us to communicate. Due to his refusal to do his job and follow my instructions, he needed to refund my money.

He said that he couldn’t because he’s broke. Well, he’s living in a very exclusive area of Tel Aviv, and he went to Paris while he was supposed to be making my film. We had a Skype conversation; I saw his palatial surroundings.

I could’ve sued or exposed him, but this is a very difficult time for me. Solving the Bakr boys’ murders made me remember all the really hideous aspects of my childhood that I’d blocked out. Murder, torture, rape, dismemberment, and worse—I saw it all firsthand, within arm’s length. I was three to five years old at the time. None of what I witnessed and did made sense. Now I dream of it every night.

When you access memories like that, your life is over. You can’t recover. Unrelenting post-traumatic stress makes the Meniere’s disease worse. Due to bouts of dizziness and images of butchery, every second of my waking life is absolute hell. The only reason I don’t kill myself is because I know that it wouldn’t change anything. I have to somehow come to terms with my memories. Death is no escape; consciousness lives on after the body dies. There’s no question.

All I want to do for the rest of my time here is blog and collect postcards. I resolved to just tune out everything that the Israeli filmmaker put me through, but then he released this deeply flawed movie under my name. Reluctantly, I have to explain that this isn’t my film. Though I wrote the script, the videos and still photos aren’t synced with the narration, the clips I specified were not used, and the animation is not accurate. The work is sloppy and careless.

Recently the filmmaker said that he’s seen the IDF footage taken by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on July 16, 2014. It shows that the IDF killed four adult terrorists with two missiles, and then Hamas removed the four bodies from the beach and replaced them with the Bakr boys.

That’s not possible. Here’s how fast the journalists arrived.

Hamas had to run to the beach, remove four adult males from the shipping container and the sand, put four dead boys in their places, and then disappear, all in under two minutes. And if the filmmaker says he’s seen the UAV footage, and I’m wrong, why the hell did he release Operation Four Little Martyrs?

The filmmaker said that he was trying to get me authorization to see the UAV footage, but I refused. The IDF owes me nothing. Their job is to defend Israel, not justify themselves to bloggers.

There are multiple reasons why the Israeli Military Advocate General (MAG) Corps and I came to different conclusions about the case of the Bakr boys.

The MAG Corps was investigating whether or not the IDF behaved criminally. Hamas’s crimes were not part of the investigation.

The UAV operators were focused on the shipping container in the Hamas naval compound, so they may not have seen the IED explode below the terrace of the Adam Hotel.

The explosion of the missile fired at the shipping container blinded the UAV operators, who were using forward-looking infrared (FLIR) cameras set to “black hot,” meaning heat appears as darkness. This is what the UAV operators saw for up to ten seconds.

It’s almost certain that the UAV operators didn’t see and the cameras didn’t record the four decoys emerging from behind their concrete slabs and running to the al-Deira Hotel.

Despite my strenuous objections, the Israeli filmmaker tried to set up a showdown between me and the IDF. He rejects my own position, that different people can come to different conclusions based on the same information. I’ve never said that the MAG Corps is wrong; I’ve said that I see the events of July 16, 2014, differently than they do. I base my interpretation strictly on forensic evidence. For example, there’s no sign that a second missile was fired. There’s no crater, no fragmentation damage, and no missile parts. The wounds on the three dead boys were not caused by an IDF missile. Period.

But maybe a second missile was fired, and it hit somewhere else. The point is, the IDF is not required to explain itself to me. A high-ranking IDF officer told me, “Reasonable people can read the MAG Corps report and come to their own conclusions.”

Exactly. This isn’t a game. We’re talking Israel’s national security. There are countless moving parts that I don’t know about.

Before everything went south, the Israeli filmmaker said that this was an impact crater.

But he also says that the UAV footage shows that the missile had a proximity fuse and exploded over the three adult terrorists’ heads—the ones who Hamas whisked off the beach and replaced with dead boys in two minutes. If the missile exploded in the air, there wouldn’t be a crater.

I’m not going to expose the Israeli filmmaker because that would drag in other people who shouldn’t have their lives upended. This problem is mine and mine alone.

So once again I’ll just shrug off what was done. As of today the Los Angeles filmmaker says that he’ll continue with his project. Maybe someday Ismail Bakr, Mohammed Bakr, Ahed Bakr, and Zakaria Bakr will have their story told by a person who actually cares about them.

They deserve better than someone who promised me the moon but delivered only a cinder block.