Who Was Behind The Israeli Airstrike? – Kolina Koltai, a Researcher at Bellingcat, Analyzes the Social Media Footprint of the Gaza Explosion
Video and photographic evidence, along with witness accounts, give some clues about Tuesday’s huge explosion at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza.
Initial claims and counterclaims focused on who was responsible. Many initial news stories reported it as an Israeli airstrike, citing the Palestinian health ministry. Israel said the accusation was caused by a failed rocket launched by a Palestinian militant group. On Wednesday, the U.S. backed up Israel’s claim, based on its own analysis of “overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information.”
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 quickly became a very confusing situation. “You have conflicting claims, all this footage.”
Israel fire struck the Gazan hospital on October 14, 2004, according to the archbishop of the diocese of Palm Beach, Palestina
Many Gazans have taken shelter at the hospital in recent days to escape Israeli bombardment, according to the archbishop. The hospital usually has 80 beds, according to the diocese website.
Over the course of a twelve day period, Israel has conducted thousands of air strikes on Gaza. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health and church officials, Israeli fire struck the hospital on October 14.
NPR independently verified the location of the blast, which can be seen in the videos, after being shown the videos by a group of experts.
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 before the blast.
There were no deaths among the hospital’s staff, as well as the patients, at the time of the explosion. “Luckily none of our staff was killed, but we had two injured,” he says.
It’s clear to me that this isn’t an airstrike. Garlasco said it. 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.
Israeli embassy bombing of the Gaza Strip on Oct. 17: Palestinian civilians and U.S. troops, security sources and the Gazan government
Death estimates vary widely, but are believed to be in the hundreds. Garlasco, who has investigated war crimes all over the world, believes it would be the highest death toll he has 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.
Hundreds of people were feared dead after an explosion at a hospital in the Gaza Strip on Oct. 17, a little over a week after the Palestinian group Hamas staged a terrorist attack on Israel that killed 1,400 people and led Israel to declare war and begin bombing the territory.
The claims haven’t been independently verified. The various accounts are assessed by the New York Times through an analysis of photos, video footage and other evidence.
The Israeli military said Wednesday morning that the number of casualties was inflated. The Gazan health ministry said on Wednesday that 471 people had been killed and hundreds more injured.
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 the assessment was based on intelligence, missile activity and open-sourced video and images of the incident.
A senior Defense Department official stated that the US was pretty confident that the launch wasn’t 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 Israeli Military Observes the Explosion at a Gazan Hospital, Explaining the Attack: On the Report of the Attack on Tuesday Night
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 now working for The New York Times, pointed out the time stamp on the video showed 8 pm local time, an 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. Not mistakes of this size.
According to the Israeli military, the Palestinian group fired at least 10 rockets at Israel, one of which struck a parking lot outside a hospital.
He cited a photo that was posted on social media as proof that there was no impact 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.
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 a wiretapped conversation involving two Hamas members that he said showed that a rocket was fired from a cemetery near the hospital. The Times is assessing the material and has not verified the conversation.
Yousef Abu al-Rish, top official for the Gazan health ministry, said at a news conference on Tuesday night that the hospital director was told by the Israeli military that there had been an earlier blast and that they needed to evacuate.
The warnings to the hospital were not part of the push by Israel to encourage people to leave northern Gaza.
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. Colonel Shefler said the hospital was not a target for the military.
How misinformation is affecting the coverage of the Gaza hospital blast and the attacks on the Gazan hospital: A WIRED story about how disinformation is spreading on social media
The reporting was done by Emmabubola, Iyad Abuheweila, Aaron Boxerman, Patrick Kingsley, Haley Wills, and Peter Baker.
“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.
But in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the shifting accounts in news outlets and the rapid spread on social media of unverified information, old videos, and bogus eyewitness accounts fueled speculation, suspicion, and outrage — and, experts say, are making it more difficult to establish accountability for the tragedy.
Many people had made up their minds before the evidence became available about who was to blame for the carnage. Protests broke out across the Middle East and a planned summit between President Joe Biden and Palestinian, Egyptian, and Jordanian leaders was canceled.
A flood of misinformation in a short time appears to be having a material effect on the diplomacy around the conflict and on mass protests, which have the ability to lead to violence. It is hard to argue that misinformation is a central story in this case.
Another much-viewed video claiming to show the hospital blast was first posted in 2022, in what’s become a common tactic of recycling and misrepresenting conflict footage.
“If you can make people believe something, then that is something that they will try to use in order to get a better assessment of what happened,” said E. Rosalie Li, a researcher and founder.
Read David and Vittoria Elliot’s WIRED story about how disinformation is getting worse on X. Read David on the role misinformation played in coverage of the recent Gaza hospital explosion. Also read Davids story regarding how the misinformation problems on X may be worse because of posts by the owner of X.
On Tuesday, an x account claimed to be from Al Jazeera and said that it had seen evidence of the hospital being hit by a rocket. Al Jazeera disavowed the account, saying it had no journalist by that name. A quick glance at the account’s posts showed it had previously trollPakistan’s cricket team and been posting about Indian politics.
The account was taken down after it quickly gained followers and was shared with other accounts, including by a conservative national security group in the US.
Many of the false or fraudulent claims about the hospital explosion are being made by accounts carrying checkmarks. Anyone can get a subscription to a Musk account for $8 a month, but those used to signal who it was were no longer with the company. Accounts with the checkmarks are boosted on the platform and are eligible to earn advertising money if their posts get enough views.
“The way that the platform has been shifted just rewards, encourages, incentivizes and amplifies the bulls***,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
The Israel-Hamas War: What the Online Media Has to Say About It and What It Did About Its Israelis, And What They Have Done About It
One post from a checkmarked account contained a screenshot of a fake Facebook page appearing to show Israel’s military claiming credit for the attack. It received more than a million views. The post has since been deleted, but many others using the same language and the same screenshot remain on X.
According to NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news sources, nearly three-quarters of the 250 most-engaged posts on X promoting false or unsubstantiated narratives about the conflict were made by accounts carrying subscription checkmarks.
We are looking for answers right away. And sometimes we don’t have answers right away,” she said. “In times like this, where you can’t take the slow, methodical work that usually [open-source investigation] requires, it could have really dangerous repercussions.
Some accounts on X claim to do open-sourced investigations from quickly pushing out the definitive takes, which later turn out to be wrong.
“X is an absolute misinformation and disinformation crisis, and that environment is very harmful to getting to a common understanding of what happened, and trying to make sure there is accountability around what looks like a pretty clear disaster,” Scott-Railton said.
Misinformation is common all over the world. False accounts of events, doctored photos, and purposely misleading news stories are quickly shared and passed around on social media, usually by well-meaning people who don’t know they’re sharing incorrect information. It’s a big problem in the best of times, but the stakes become much higher during a heated crisis like the current Israel-Hamas war. As the violence in and around Gaza has continued to escalate, people are turning to places like X (aka Twitter) for the latest news on the conflict. But they’ve been met with a flood of bad info—old videos, fake photos, and inaccurate reports—that researchers say is unprecedented.
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