Exposed: The Self-Inflicted Hamas 'Massacre' Blamed By the Media on Israel

by James Delingpole

Aug 1, 2014 5:25 AM PT

An enterprising blogger's diligent spadework has revealed the truth behind an Israeli 'massacre' that never was. (H/T Jonathan Foreman)

According to the Hamas version of events - widely promulgated in the media by ITN, the Telegraph and the Belfast Telegraph - an Israeli airstrike on a crowded market place during a partial ceasefire in the Shijaiyah neighbourhood of Gaza City on July 30th, 2014 was responsible for the deaths of 17  people, including blue-helmeted photojournalist Rani Rayan.

However as Thomas Wictor has incontrovertibly demonstrated using close analysis of film footage of the incident, the deaths were not caused by Israeli shrapnel but by secondary explosions from a vast cache of Hamas rockets.

Oh, and the market wasn't 'crowded' either: it had been closed for the day.

And this particular area wasn't included in the ceasefire zone, either, because Hamas was continuing to fire rockets from it.

Here is how it continues to be reported at theTelegraph website.

"Israeli strike on a market in the eastern Gaza Strip kills 17 Palestinians on Wednesday, the local health ministry says".

Here is the Belfast Telegraph's version.

The second airstrike struck an area about 500 meters away, according to witnesses, immediately killing at least 16 people, among them local Palestinian photographer Rami Rayan, who was wearing a press vest at the time.

"People were in the street and in the market, mostly women and kids. Suddenly more than 10 shells landed in the area, the market, in the Turkman area, and next to the gas station," said Salim Qadoum, 26, who witnessed the strike. "The area now is like a blood bath, everyone is wounded or killed. People lost their limbs and were screaming for help. It's a massacre. I vomited when I saw what happened."

This report implies that it was the ten Israeli shells which killed the 17 Palestinians. It was not. As Wictor demonstrates, it was a "Pallywood" propaganda stunt which went badly wrong:

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 a damaged rocket cone, calling it an “unexploded Israeli missile.”

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