Why it is difficult to know what is real about the Gaza Hospital explosion
A Palestinian Hospital in Gaza: Israel’s Attack on a Hamas-Saliban Hospital, an Israeli State, Revisited
The health ministry of Gaza claimed the blast was caused by an Israeli rocket attack, and that hundreds of people had died, making it one of the worst attacks of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. News organizations such as The New York Times and Reuters ran with the claim, pushing notification alerts to people’s phones with the news that Israeli rockets had killed Palestinians sheltering in a hospital in Gaza. “Breaking news: Israeli strike on hospitals kill hundreds, Palestinian officials say,” The New York Times alert read.
Soon after those push notifications went out, the Israeli military said its intelligence officers had tracked rockets fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an armed militant group in Gaza that is aligned with Hamas against Israel but often acts independently. Israeli military officials said they observed Islamic Jihad rockets passing the hospital at the time of the strike, adding that it was these projectiles—not an Israeli rocket—that hit the facility’s parking lot.
Social media is awash with claims and counterclaims of who was behind the explosion, according to Kolina Koltai, a researcher with the open source investigations group Bellingcat. She says it was a very confusing situation. You have conflicting claims.
A doctor who was working at the time of the blast said that there were hundreds of people who had come to the hospital to hide. The hospital, Gaza’s oldest, is run by a Christian group.
In twelve days, Israel has conducted thousands of air strikes on the Gaza Strip. The hospital was struck by fire on October 14 according to the church and the health ministry.
Where is the evidence of what happened at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza? – A spokesperson for the Palestinian embassy in Gaza
Several experts in geolocation have shown that the videos show the blast occurring at the hospital and NPR independently was able to verify those geolocations.
One video, a live broadcast feed from the news channel Al Jazeera, appears to show what could be a rocket launching from a site west of the hospital. The rocket appeared to break apart high above the hospital moments before the blast.
Photos from the following day also appear to show little damage to the hospital buildings, and a relatively small blast zone from the explosion. That damage pattern is inconsistent with a large air-dropped bomb, which would leave a crater and create a shockwave that would damage or destroy surrounding structures, says Marc Garlasco, a former targeting officer for the U.S. military who now works for PAX, a Netherlands-based non-profit.
“It’s very clear to me that this is not an airstrike.” Garlasco says. Israeli bombs typically leave craters three to ten meters in size, and are designed to create a large shockwave that propels shrapnel over a large area.
The lack of both shrapnel damage and structural damage to the hospital is inconsistent with all types of commonly used Israeli bombs and artillery shells, he says.
Comments on a Palestinian Blast at Gaza Hospital: Israel’s response to the Israeli version of the Gazan attack is “very high end of anything I’ve seen”
Death estimates vary widely, but are believed to be in the hundreds. Garlasco, who has investigated war crimes all over the world, says such a high death toll would be toward the “extreme high end of anything I’ve ever seen.” He thought it was plausible due to the fact that many Palestinian civilians have left their homes to seek refuge in a few supposedly safe locations.
“There’s just been this massive sort of pressure to get videos out there, get your take, get your analysis, and it’s like a perfect storm for chaos,” Kolina Koltai, a senior researcher at open source intelligence (OSINT) news outlet Bellingcat, tells WIRED.
News organizations changed their headlines to show the counterclaim from Israel. The New York Times updated their headline to say that at least 500 dead in blast at Gaza hospital.
The official Israeli account posted a video that showed it was the result of a misguided rocket launched by Islamic Jihad and that it was the cause of the explosion. But within minutes, Aric Toler, a former Bellingcat researcher who now works for The New York Times, pointed out that the time stamp on the video showed 8 pm local time, a full hour after the explosion took place.
