Gaza hospital massacre exposes cracks in Israeli version

Maqsood Maniyar | NT

Bengaluru: About five days after the massive blast at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in central Gaza killed 470 people; Israeli claims about the incident have been debunked by multiple media houses.

The United Nations (UN) has called for an independent investigation even as Palestinian officials and Hamas blamed an Israeli munition for the deaths and destroyed infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the investigative journalism group Bellingcat has declared that the absence of a large crater is inconsistent with Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) used by Israel that can weigh 500, 1,000 or 2,000 pounds.

It doesn’t rule out the use of an airburst munition that can cause massive loss of life but comparatively less infrastructure damage such as blown-out windows as opposed to collapsed buildings.

However, this is as good a case as Israel can make for itself, as official Israeli spokespersons have been repeatedly fact-checked and found to be lacking.

Caught flip-flopping

For instance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s digital aide Hananya Naftali first posted on the microblogging site X (previously Twitter) that Israel had struck a hospital in Gaza, calling it a “Hamas terrorist base”.

He then deleted the post and claimed that it was a missile misfire by the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad (IJ), a claim the group has denied.

Interestingly, the official X account of Israel also posted a video claiming that CCTV footage had caught a misfiring missile hitting the hospital. When pointed out by several users that the missiles being fired in the video carried a time stamp nearly an hour after the hospital was hit, they edited the post by removing the clip.

Live stream claim debunked

Later on, Israeli Defence Force (IDF) spokespersons claimed that a live stream by broadcast channel Al Jazeera (AJ) had caught a misfired missile hitting the hospital but AJ denied the allegation.

AJ’s investigation team, Sanad revealed that their channel’s live stream began at 6:45 pm local time and offered a second-by-second analysis of the same.

The video captures four Israeli airstrikes between 6:54 pm and 6:58 pm. The live stream was consistent with another video captured in Tel Aviv as both captured a rocket being launched from Gaza at 6:59 pm.

The AJ stream caught the rocket in question being intercepted and destroyed 15 seconds later by the Israeli missile defence system Iron Dome.

There is an explosion in Gaza exactly five seconds later and another two seconds into the video, one can see the blast that hit the hospital. This proves that there were seven seconds between the rocket interception and the hospital explosion.

INCONSISTENCIES GALORE

IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari on Wednesday claimed that the alleged missile was fired from a nearby cemetery, but BBC reporters on the ground said there was no cemetery in the area.

IDF also alleged that the supposed rocket was fired from the southwest.

However, the University of London research group Forensic Architecture studied the impact crater and found that the rocket likely came from the northeast, the direction of the Israeli-controlled Gaza outskirts.