Thomas Wictor

In previous assaults on Gaza, Israeli forces met only light resistance. During Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09, when the army attacked Gaza’s civilian population with indiscriminate firepower, most Israeli casualties were the result of fratricide.

That’s a lie. Ten IDF soldiers were killed in Operation Cast Lead; only four died from fratricide.

But this time was different. With little more than light weapons at their disposal, uniformed Qassam fighters engaged the Israelis at close distances, sometimes just a few meters away, exposing a glaring weakness of the Middle East’s most heavily equipped, technologically advanced armies. During the battle, Qassam fighters scored a hit on an Israeli armored personnel carrier, killing five soldiers inside, then momentarily captured the fatally wounded Lt. Shaul Oron.

Max is lying about the terrorists being uniformed. Hamas never fights in uniforms.

Saying they wore uniforms is Max’s attempt to give Hamas an air of legitimacy, because he’s deeply in love with them. But they wore civilian clothes, as they always do in battle.

As for the “glaring weakness of the Middle East’s most heavily equipped[sic], technologically advanced armies[sic],” Max is creatively reframing the situation. There was no glaring weakness; this is called “a firefight.” When the enemy has sophisticated weaponry such as antitank guided missiles, they’re able to do damage.

Max is arguing that Hamas is both lightly and lethally armed. He wants you to both feel sorry for them and be proud of them. And seven Israelis soldiers—not five—were killed when the APC was hit with the antitank guided missile.

Back in Shujaiya, the shelling momentarily subsided for a one-hour ceasefire. But the International Committee of the Red Cross proved unable to evacuate those trapped in the area, possibly because of the Israeli army’s refusal to coordinate with its first responders or because the army had targeted its ambulances in airstrikes.

Actually, the Red Cross brokered the ceasefire with the IDF.

Guess who didn’t honor the humanitarian ceasefire?

Not only did the IDF not respond to Hamas’s provocations, it agreed to an extension of the ceasefire.

So it was a four-hour, not one-hour ceasefire. Israel abided by it, but Hamas didn’t. Max doesn’t care in the slightest.

And look what else he leaves out.

In a last sweep of the area on Sunday afternoon, rescue workers heard the faint voice of a woman in the rubble of a house.

“I’m here with my husband and niece,” the woman said, adding that there were also three bodies near her. “I’m here under the shop. God please, I can’t breathe.”

In the incident witnessed by Associated Press journalists, rescue workers tried to organize a bulldozer, but the situation was deemed too dangerous and the crew left. Later, the rescue workers returned with a bulldozer, after coordination with Israeli forces through the Red Crescent, and pulled the three from the rubble, said Said Hamam, a member of the rescue services.

Here’s video of several ambulances in Shijaiyah. The explosions are Hamas mortars being fired from the building. Listen for the debris falling at 0:02 and 0:31.

Those are outgoing rounds, not incoming. What you’re hearing is Max Blumenthal’s friends putting the entire neighborhood at risk.

By this time, the neighborhood was engulfed in flames and shrouded in darkness — Israeli forces had bombed all of its electricity towers.

Another lie. The IDF doesn’t bomb civilian critical infrastructure. However, over 300 Hamas rockets fell in Gaza. Some cut the power lines. And no, that article is wrong. Israel didn’t bomb Gaza’s power station. It was hit by a Hamas rocket.

Thus the stragglers and wounded were at the mercy of Israel’s Golani Brigade special forces troops, which had taken up positions at the edge of Shujaiya, occupying homes just east of the area’s main mosque.

The Golani Brigade are regular infantry, not special forces.

Palestinians were “at the mercy” of them? What does that mean? How come only seventy people out of 100,000 were killed? Not much of a massacre, Max.

In each home the soldiers occupied, I found walls etched with crude maps of the immediate vicinity. Each house was assigned a number, possibly to enable commanders to call in air and artillery strikes ahead of their forward positions.

No, Max. The IDF has the Tzayad Digital Army Program, which allows all the branches of the service to link up. BY COMPUTER. Drawing maps on walls is what Palestinians do.

In the ruins of a second-floor bedroom, in an empty ammo box under a tattered bed, a colleague discovered two laminated maps of Shujaiya. They were photographed by satellite at 10:32am on July 17, just days before the neighborhood was flattened. The date in the upper-right-hand corner of one map was written American-style, with the month before the day, raising the question of whether a US or Israeli satellite had captured the image.

It raises the question only if you’re a complete imbecile. Israel has had its own military satellites for years. The US gets intelligence from Israel. What you found was a prop. A Palestinian downloaded it from Google Earth. Or maybe you did, Max.

Massacres in Broad Daylight

Not a single photo or video, though. Strange, huh? Since it happened in broad daylight, as the IDF vengefully avenged itself. Here are some IDF soldiers wounded in Shijaiyah.

Each one is worth 5,000,000,0000,000,000 Max Blumenthals.

It was here, Al Areer told me, that four of his brothers were executed in cold blood. One of them, Hassan Al Areer, was mentally disabled and had little idea he was about to be killed. Mohammed Al Areer said he found bullet casings next to their heads when he discovered their decomposing bodies.

Strangely, you didn’t say they were killed by the IDF. A tacit admission that your precious Hamas killed them, huh, Max?

The death of the death of Salem Shamaly

And now we come to the Shamaly family, the most star crossed people on the planet.

Hesham Naser Shamaly, 25, described to me what happened when five members of his family decided to stay in their home to guard the thousands of dollars of clothing stocks they planned to sell through their family business. When soldiers approached the home with weapons drawn, Shamaly said his father emerged from the home with his hands up and attempted to address them in Hebrew.

“He couldn’t even finish the sentence before they shot him,” Shamaly told me. “He was only injured and fainted, but they thought he was dead so they left him there and moved on to the others. They shot the rest — my uncle, my uncle’s wife, and my two cousins — they shot them dead.”

Miraculously, Shamaly’s father managed to revive himself after laying bleeding for almost three days. He walked on his own strength toward Gaza City and found medical help. “Someone called me to tell me he was alive,” Shamaly said, “and I thought it was a joke.”

He walked on his own strength? Whose strength would he have used instead? The neighbors’? Or was he hooked up to a battery, like Galvani’s frog legs? And the Shamalys definitely need new friends.

“Hesham, your father’s alive! No, I’m just joking. He’s really dead. But I had you going for a second, didn’t I?”

And then poor Max lets the cat out of the bag and confirms the fraudulence of the most widely reported “atrocity story” to come out of Operation Protective Edge.

Hesham Shamaly’s 22-year-old cousin, Salem, was also executed by the Israeli soldiers who had taken up positions in the neighborhood. When Salem Shamaly returned to his neighborhood during the temporary ceasefire at 3:30pm on July 20 to search for missing family members alongside members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), he apparently crossed the imaginary red line drawn by the soldiers.

When he waded into a pile of rubble, a single shot rang out from a nearby sniper, sending his body crumpling to the ground. As he attempted to get up, another shot struck him in the chest. A third shot left his body limp.

No visible wounds, but okay. We’ll agree that Salem had transparent blood and wore a self-healing shirt.

But how do you explain this, Max?

When Salem’s family finally retrieved his body, they found it badly burned, almost unrecognizable, and tossed dozens of meters from the location where he had been killed by subsequent bombardments.

Wait: You said he was killed by a sniper, but now you say he was killed by subsequent bombardments? Oh, I get it! What you meant to write was, “When Salem’s family finally retrieved his body, they found it badly burned, almost unrecognizable, and tossed by subsequent bombardments dozens of meters from the location where he had been killed.”

But what’s this garbage about the family finding him, and his body was badly burned? The father went to the morgue with Ayman Mohyeldin of NBC News and identified the body there. Rescuers brought it in after it had decomposed in the sun for a week.

Max continues his fantasy.

When Shamaly’s[sic] finally found a place to bury him, they had to open a pre-existing grave because that cemetery was also full.

Nope. We saw with our own eyes on NBC that they buried him in a vacant lot.

I knew the Shamaly family were lying. There’s no way to reconcile these two completely different versions of events. Salem wasn’t killed by an Israeli sniper, and now we have Max Blumenthal definitively debunking that ridiculously faked ISM film.

Thanks, Max! I’m sure the IDF is grateful too. Give Salem Shamaly a big, wet, moose kiss for us the next time you see him.