Thomas Wictor

I’ve gotten hundreds of reader questions about the Hamas deception operation that took place on the beach at Gaza, July 16, 2014. Though I have no doubt that my theories about Operation Four Little Martyrs are generally correct, nobody in the current Israeli government has contacted me. Several active-duty members of the Israeli Defense Forces have confirmed specific details; however, these were not people involved in the incident.

Israel can’t even discuss two aspects of my theories: A Hamas triple agent betrayed the Israelis, and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fired a missile at the police post on the breakwater. Nobody will ever mention the triple agent, because Israel must of course keep its clandestine operations secret. As to the second point, IDF policy is to neither confirm nor deny capabilities of individual weapon systems.

Readers have asked if I’m being led astray by my helpers. No. Every single piece of important information has been given to me disguised in a message about something else. Not one e-mail has said, “Here’s a photo that answers your question,” or “Here’s a link that proves ________.” I don’t have sources whispering secrets in my ears.

For example.

I posted this screen grab.

Since Gaza is almost as secretive as North Korea, I didn’t actually know the location It took me months to work out the names of hotels and their locations.

So somebody sent a message about something else. The person included a photo with the comment, “You know of course that the terrace is at the Adam Hotel.”

Actually, I didn’t know. But see the green arrow? That’s the metal container that formed part of the police post struck on July 10, 2014, at 2:00 a.m.

The person who sent the photo of the terrace at the Adam Hotel made no mention of the steel container, but there’s no question that I was supposed to notice it.

My best information has been sent by people telling me I’m completely wrong, and that they’re going to expose me as a fraud. There’s nobody—I repeat, nobody—representing themselves as Israeli intelligence officers. I’ve not asked my helpers who they are. When they argue or are rude, I fight back and tell them to cram it.

And then they send me more priceless information, telling me I’m full of crap. It’s entirely possible that these are private citizens who vehemently disagree with me. The point is, I’m not being led anywhere. In fact I’ve been given false information, accompanied by a triumphant, “This proves you’re wrong!” It’s forced me to find the real McCoy.

Although my theory is entirely my own in terms of culpability if I’m wrong, I had tons of help from unknown people who often insulted me, belittled me, and tried to bully me. I can’t say that they were really trying to help me. Some of them are insufferably annoying.

My final word on my helpers is this: On January 28, 1996, I interviewed an Israeli named Chaim Witz. He goes by the stage name Gene Simmons, and he plays in a band called Kiss.

Mine was the first in-depth interview by a “credible” music publication, and Simmons was rightfully wary. You’ve seen how I can write; I could’ve made my bones by doing a vicious, funny hatchet job on him. But he’s one of my heroes. When he came to the US, he spoke no English, had never walked on a paved road, and didn’t know what television was. My idea was to somehow communicate that we had a great opportunity to demolish all the preconceptions.

The interview began conventionally. I let him give me the answers he’d always given, and then I began to challenge him. To make sure he knew that this was performance art, I got out of my chair and sat at his feet, looking up at him. He instantly got it, and we were off to the races. We had several screaming fights that weren’t fake, but they weren’t personal, and they were…mutually respectful in a bizarre way. I played straight man to him, and he gave me one of the two best interviews of my career.

I’m proud to say it was the most popular article the magazine ever published, due to Simmons’s perceptiveness and courage. He took a huge chance on me.

But it was all unspoken. We didn’t acknowledge what we were doing. It must be an Israeli thing to be able to understand intent without it having to be spelled out. Read my book In Cold Sweat. It’s got every word of the performance art Gene Simmons and I improvised. I always thought it would make a great play.

Questions from readers

1. How do you know that the body of Ismail Bakr was collected first, and then the other three corpses were placed in the sand? All the videos show the opposite.

The Palestinian videos have been edited to confuse. It took me months to figure out the sequence of events. The smoking gun is a screen grab from NBC News.

An ambulance is parked above the “C” in “Casualties of War,” at the corner of the Avenue Restaurant and Coffee Shop. About four people stand on the beach, waiting. All the footage we have shows journalists running onto an empty beach. Here’s Liseron Boudoul of TF1 News among them.

The NBC screen grab has to have been taken after the body of Ismail Bakr was removed. If he was taken away first, that means the others were “discovered” later. We also have Alex Marquardt of ABC News (blue arrow) arriving right behind Liseron Boudoul (red arrow).

When Marquardt ran past the place where the three other bodies were “found,” the sand was empty.

2. Couldn’t the flaccid eyeballs of the dead boys be the result of them losing all their blood pressure due to being blown apart by shells?

No. The boys weren’t blown apart by shells. Their giant wounds didn’t bleed. All their injuries were inflicted postmortem. And the Israeli navy denied firing at the beach.

3. Why do you think the four boys photographed by Stefanie Dekker of al-Jazeera are decoys?

Several reasons. They couldn’t have run as far as they did if they were up playing on the breakwater. First they would’ve had to fight their way through all this junk.

Then they would’ve had to cross this distance,

Finally they would’ve had to climb over more rubble, trash, and fencing.

If they’d been nearly blown up by a shell or missile, they would’ve experienced several seconds of disorientation. Their ears would be ringing, and they would’ve been in shock. Dekker’s photo was taken less than five seconds after the missile strike.

There’s absolutely no way they could’ve recovered their senses and run that far right after being so close to an explosion that came out of the blue.

The IDF would’ve been able to identify them as children, the UAV operators wouldn’t have missed if they fired at them on the beach, none of the boys were severely injured, and their stories are all radically different.

4. Why did the ambulance park so far from the breakwater?

To allow journalists to get their pornographic images of Ismail Bakr.

Also, while the press followed the paramedics to the ambulance, Hamas removed the bodies of the two adult males that Nick Casey of the Wall Street Journal saw in the police post.

They used this white “TV” truck to haul away the corpses.

5. Where’s the Wall Street Journal article confirming that this was a Hamas operation?

There is none. Nick Casey of the Wall Street Journal confirmed that there were two adult males dead in the police post along with Ismail Bakr. This is what Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner said after the attack.

The IDF had a target, a Hamas terrorist target. We had intelligence pointing specifically to that location, and we had the indication that the perpetrators were on the beach. We had visual surveillance, clearly, to an extent that we should have been able to determine who was on the beach.

What happened was that the Hamas triple agent gave the Israelis intelligence that Terrorist X would be in the steel container at around 4:00 p.m. in order to carry out a mission. An Israeli unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) watched the two adult males enter the container. Some kind of identification was made. The men had equipment, probably a dummy antitank missile (ATGM).

Here’s a screen grab from a fake Hamas video purporting to show the destruction of an Israeli tank.

That’s a Russian Kornet ATGM, of which Hamas has plenty.

The Israelis were told that the perpetrators were going to launch an attack. My guess is the fake mission was to fire an ATGM at a hotel where western journalists were staying. So the IDF used a small air-to-surface missile to kill the terrorists. Then Hamas set the rest of the operation in motion. Speed was of the essence; everything happened within seconds. Four boys emerged from hiding and ran, and two more IEDs were detonated. I’m sure the IDF had no idea what was going on, so someone concluded that they must’ve accidentally killed the four boys.

I knew that was almost certainly not the case. Israeli UAV operators would’ve immediately seen that the four runners were children. Initially I thought the boys might have been carrying sticks in their “Arabs and Jews” game, but now I believe that the stories the five “survivors” told are all lies.

Nick Casey tweeted that there were two adult males in the police post. Then he deleted that tweet. When I said the Wall Street Journal confirmed the Hamas operation, that’s actually true, but it’s also my sarcastic way of calling attention to the bottomless dishonesty of the media when it comes to Israel.

6. How could Hamas have put together this plan so quickly?

They didn’t. It was obviously a plan that was months or years in the making. They used a triple agent to lure the IDF into firing at the police post. This had to have been a source that the Israelis trusted. The sheer complexity of the operation means that it had been thought out and rehearsed. Nick Casey of the Wall Street Journal reported that the police post was a restaurant.

Months before the strike of July 10, 2014, the post had indeed been repainted in order to appear to be a restaurant.

This deception laid the groundwork for Operation Four Little Martyrs. After the Israelis destroyed most of the post on the morning of July 10, the operation went ahead anyway.

7. Why are you so sure that the media is complicit?

The evidence is overwhelming. Every reporter who went to the breakwater saw that there were no corpses in the sand. The al-Deira Hotel was full of journalists shouting encouragement at four males running from Israeli shellfire, yet not one photo nor one second of video depicting this event was published. Not a single western journalist documented the removal of the three bodies “found” on the beach. Journalists reported witnessing things that didn’t happen, such as soccer games or four boys dying in one explosion.

This.

“Medics”? All four are Hamas terrorists. Even if you didn’t know that, you could see that three have cameras. Also, this photo was obviously taken after the body of Ismail Bakr was removed. The photographer knew that. Therefore the image represents at least two lies.

* * *

Those are the seven most-asked questions I get. Now I have a question.

What are you going to do about this, Israel?

Click here for a timeline of the operation. Remember that this is a work in progress, so details change as more information comes in.

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