Hamas and the Gaza Strip: The War Between the Demonstrators and the Nation’s Most Disciplined Soldiers. An Israeli Military Spokesman in Gaza
Mediators are pressing for an agreement that will allow aid to enter the Gaza Strip and refugees with foreign passports out of the enclave. The World Health Organization is warning of an imminent public health crisis in Gaza.
As Palestinians try to find safe passage and health care, a spokesman for Hamas, who attacked Israel, remains unrepentant.
A hospital blast in the Gaza Strip, which killed hundreds of people, occurred just over a week after the Palestinian group Hamas staged a terrorist attack on Israel that caused 1,400 people to die.
Of that attack, which started this latest conflict, Hamad said: “We want to get the attention of the world. We are subjected to oppression, torture and collective punishment all of the time. That’s our message for everyone.
Those hostages include some military personnel, children and one Holocaust survivor, Israeli military spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said early Tuesday morning during a briefing on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
The man said that he was more worried about the Palestinians than they were about 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 care for thousands of injured people as fuel for generators is 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
The Israel Defense Forces are Not Responsible for the Hamas Blast at the Al Ahli Gaza Strip Hospital, said U.S. Vice President Biden
The military of Israel said Tuesday it had killed Osama Mazini, a Hamas official who 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. In Israel, Biden will make a show of U.S. support. In Amman, Biden will meet with Jordanian King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
U.S. officials have said they believe at least a few Americans are being held hostage by Hamas, and Biden will seek an update on the hostage situation while he is in the region, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said.
According to the Israeli Defense forces, a bunch of rockets launched from an area southwest of the hospital caused the explosion. While the geometry of the Al Jazeera video aligns with that claim, there is no way to independently confirm the radar data.
Adrienne Watson, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said Wednesday that the U.S. government “assesses that Israel was not responsible for an explosion that killed hundreds of civilians yesterday at the Al Ahli Hospital in the Gaza Strip.”
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 head of the orthopedics department, Fadil Naim, said that hundreds of people came to the hospital to hide from the bombardment, and he was at the time of the blast. The oldest hospital in Gaza is managed by a Christian group.
NPR independently was able to verify that the videos showing the blast at the hospital were authentic after seeing how experts in geolocation have shown them.
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, or other object, appears to break apart high above the hospital moments before the blast.
He told NPR that he was in the operating room when the explosion occurred. He rushed to the courtyard after hearing the blast to see the grievous injuries the people had been inflicted on. “Some of them died in our hands,” he said.
“It’s very clear to me that this is not an airstrike.” Garlasco makes a statement. 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 says that the lack of damage to the hospital from bombs and shells is not consistent with other types of Israeli bombs and shells.
The explosion at the Gazan hospital, where a civilian civilian population is being forced to seek asylum: a counterexample to the Israel-Israel connection
Death estimates vary widely, but are believed to be in the hundreds. The high death toll would be the “extreme high end of anything” that Garlasco has ever seen, he says. 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.
She said that the United States was collecting information and that her assessment was based on intelligence, missile activity and open-source video.
A senior Defense Department official said that, based on data collected by infrared sensors, the United States was “fairly confident” the launch did not come 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.”
The group’s military wing posted a message on Telegram at 7:09 p.m. on the night of the explosion saying it had fired a barrage of rockets toward Israel — just minutes after the blast occurred.
He said that stray rockets from the military wing had killed Palestinians before. “We have made mistakes, I am not going to deny it,” he said. However, not mistakes of this size.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesman for the Israeli military, said the Palestinian group fired 10 rockets at 6:59 p.m. on the night of the explosion, and that one of them fell to earth prematurely, hitting a parking lot outside the hospital.
He showed the aerial image he said was taken overnight. There was no evidence of a crater caused by a missile in the picture, he said.
Admiral Hagari dismissed suggestions that the strike was caused by an errant Israeli air defense interceptor; he said Israel does not fire air defense missiles into Gazan airspace.
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.
An Israeli spokesman said that the calls to the hospital were part of a larger campaign to convince civilians to leave northern Gaza. Colonel Shefler said the hospital was not a target for the military.
On the pressure to get out there and to get your take on the issues – A survey of Bellingcat’s students at the University of Maryland
Reporting was contributed by Emma Bubola , Iyad Abuheweila , Aaron Boxerman , Patrick Kingsley , Christoph Koettl , Haley Willis , Yousur Al-Hlou and Peter Baker .
The pressure to get videos out there, to get your take, to get your analysis, is a perfect storm for chaos, according to a senior researcher at Bellingcat.