The Israeli students and the "BB18 fuse holder"

As it circulates: a group of young Israeli men were seen filming and cheering from a New Jersey parking lot as the towers burned, and were arrested in a van belonging to Urban Moving Systems. Israeli "art students" had been reported living near federal buildings across the United States. Israeli firms had offices in the towers. Warnings, the claim says, went out to Israelis and to Jewish employees, and few or none died. Later, photographs said to be from the towers were circulated showing a small black electrical part, identified in forums as a BB18 fuse holder, and presented as evidence that detonator circuits had been wired into the buildings.

The van arrests and the "art students" reports are real events, reported at the time by the Forward, Ha'aretz and ABC News, and later examined by the FBI. That real reporting is the seed. It was then grafted onto an older claim: within days of the attacks, an item asserting that 4,000 Israelis were absent from work spread from a Hezbollah-affiliated broadcaster and Al-Manar and onward through email chains — a number that came from an Israeli foreign ministry statement about calls received asking after roughly 4,000 Israelis believed to be in the New York area, not about anyone warned to stay away. The BB18 photograph entered later, through message-board image analysis of debris and salvage pictures where the component's provenance was never established.

The detained men were investigated and deported on immigration violations; the FBI investigation, and the 9/11 Commission's review of the intelligence record, found no evidence of foreknowledge or participation. On the "no Jews died" claim, the record is the opposite: roughly 5 Israeli citizens were killed, and a substantial number of the victims were Jewish New Yorkers, named in the official victim lists. The commercially available BB18-type fuse holder is a standard low-voltage automotive and equipment part sold at hardware counters; it is not demolition hardware, and no chain of custody has ever placed the photographed part in either tower. What remains, once the false parts are stripped out, is a narrow true fact — foreign intelligence services, Israel's among others, gathered in the United States and that friction was reported at the time. Extending that into authorship of the attacks is not a step the evidence supports, and the specific claim that Jews were warned is a hoax whose origin can be dated to the week of the attacks.