Hamas has no intentions of releasing hostages during the war in Israel, says the group’s spokesman
Israel’s response to the Gaza attack on Oct. 14, a U.S. Embassy spokesman told the Tel Aviv embassy
“It is critical that aid begins flowing into Gaza as soon as possible,” Blinken said at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. He said that there are discussions to establish areas to help keep civilians safe.
As Palestinians have a hard time finding safe passage and reliable water, a spokesman for Hamas remained unrepentant for the attack on Israel.
Since a series of attacks on Israel by Hamas killed over a 1000 people, Israel has been bombarding Gaza thousands of times. Church officials and the Palestinian Ministry of Health say that Israeli fire had previously struck the hospital on Oct. 14.
Of that attack, which started this latest conflict, Hamad said: “We want to get the attention of the world. We are under oppression and torture and collective punishment all the time. That’s our message for the world.”
Some military personnel, children and one Holocaust survivor are among the hostages, an Israeli military spokesman said early Tuesday.
He said that he was more concerned with the Palestinians than the hostages. Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are struggling as Israel shut off the supply of food and power to Gaza’s main electricity grid days ago. Hospitals are struggling to treat injured people because generators are running out.
After meetings with Israeli officials, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the U.S. and Israel had agreed to develop a plan to get aid from “donor nations and multilateral organizations” to the besieged Gaza Strip
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Israel’s military said it killed Osama Mazini, a Hamas official, who it said was responsible for taking prisoners and directing terrorist strikes against Israel.
Amid the growing fears of violence potentially expanding across the region, the White House announced President Biden will visit Tel Aviv and Amman, Jordan, on Wednesday. Biden will show the United States’ support for the country in Israel. In Amman, Biden will meet with Jordanian King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
John Kirby, National Security Council spokesman, said Vice President Biden will seek an update on the hostages situation while in the region, as he believes some Americans are being held hostage by Hamas.
The health ministry in Gaza claimed that hundreds of people had been killed in an Israeli rocket attack, making it one of the worst attacks of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. The New York Times ran with the claim, pushing notifications to people’s phones with the news that Israeli rockets had killed Palestinians in a hospital in Gaza. “Breaking news: Israeli strike on hospitals kill hundreds, Palestinian officials say,” The New York Times alert read.
According to aerial footage, photos taken in the aftermath of the blast and recordings it said were from Hamas, the blast was caused by a rocket that didn’t hit the ground.
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 that it became a very confusing situation immediately. “You have conflicting claims, all this footage.”
The displaced Palestinians were in the courtyard at the time of the blast. There were parked cars in the small courtyard that had a few grassy patches where people congregated.
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 appears to break apart above the hospital just before the blast.
The explosion happened while Dr. Naim was in the operating room. He went to the courtyard after hearing the blast to find people with amputations and other injuries. He said some of them died in our hands.
It’s clear to me that this is not an airstrike. Garlasco says so. 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.
He thinks that the lack of damage to the hospital from bombs and shells is not in line with most other types of Israeli weapons.
Israeli rocket activity is not a misguided rocket launch: a defense official disputes the claim that the explosion occurred outside a hospital parking lot
Death estimates are widely variable but are believed to be 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.” But he found it plausible, he said, given that so many Palestinian civilians have left their homes to seek refuge in a small number of supposedly safe locations.
The competing claims have not been independently verified. The New York Times is working to assess the various accounts through an analysis of photos, video footage and other evidence, as well as on-the-ground interviews.
The figures could not be independently confirmed, though video footage verified by The New York Times shows scores of bodies strewn across the hospital’s courtyard.
“Our assessment is based on available reporting, including intelligence, missile activity and open-source video and images of the incident,” she said, adding that the United States was continuing to collect information.
A senior defense department official said that the US was fairly confident that the launch was not from Israeli forces.
In a phone interview with The Times on Wednesday, a spokesman for the group, Musab Al-Breim, said that the capacity of their weapons supply was “primitive.”
In the hours after the attack, @Israel, the official Israeli account on X (formerly Twitter), posted a video it claimed was proof that the explosion was the result of a misguided rocket launched by Islamic Jihad militants. Aric Toler, a former Bellingcat researcher who 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.
He acknowledged that errant rockets from the military wing had killed Palestinians in the past. “We have made mistakes, I am not going to deny it,” he said. This is not mistakes of this size.
On the night of the explosion, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said that the group of Palestinians fired 10 rockets at Israel, one of which fell to earth outside a hospital parking lot.
He cited a photo of the parking lot that was posted on social media on Wednesday morning that he said did not show the kind of impact that would have been caused by an Israeli missile. The photo shows the effects of a fire — burned-out cars and scorched ground — that he said was caused by rocket fuel.
The strike was not caused by an Israeli air defense Missile, but rather by a stray missile from Gaza, according to the admiral.
The admiral played a recording of what he said was a wiretapped conversation between two Hamas members, in which one speaker says the damage was caused by a rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad from a cemetery near the hospital. The conversation has not been verified by The Times.
Yousef Abu al-Rish, the top official for the Gazan health ministry, said at a news conference on Tuesday night that the Israeli military had called the hospital director and told him that the earlier blast had been a warning to evacuate.
Archbishop Naoum said the warnings were particular to the hospital, and not part of Israel’s wider push to encourage civilians to leave northern Gaza for the territory’s south.
Lt. Col. Amnon Shefler, an Israeli military spokesman, said the calls to the hospital were part of a wider campaign to urge civilians to leave northern Gaza ahead of an expected Israeli invasion. The hospital was not a target for the military.
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Reporting was done by Emma Bubola, Iyad Abuheweila, Aaron Boxerman, Patrick Kingsley, Christoph Koettl, Haley Willis, Yousur Al-Hrood, and Peter Baker.
It’s like a perfect storm for chaos because there’s been massive pressure to get videos out there, get your take, and get your analysis.
