The Gaza Hospital Explosion: An Unexpected Attack on the Hamas-Israeli Joint Medical Center, the New York Times, and the Jerusalem Post
The Gaza health ministry claimed the explosion was caused by a rocket attack from Israel and that hundreds of people were killed, making it the bloodiest attack of the current fighting between Israel and Hamas. The New York Times ran a story about Israeli rockets killing Palestinians in a hospital in Gaza, and as a result of that, sent out notification to people’s phones. A New York Times alert said that Israeli strikes on hospitals have killed hundreds.
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.
There are many claims and counterclaims on the social media about who was behind the explosion. “Immediately it just became a very confusing situation,” she says. “You have conflicting claims, all this footage.”
There were hundreds of people, including families, who had come to the hospital to hide from the bombardment elsewhere in Gaza, according to Dr. Fadil Naim, the head of the orthopedics department, who was working at the time of the blast. The hospital, Gaza’s oldest, is run by a Christian group.
More than a thousand Israelis have been killed in the Gaza Strip since a wave of attacks by Hamas began a week ago. Church officials and the Palestinian Ministry of Health say that Israeli fire had previously struck the hospital on Oct. 14.
NPR: “Here’s the available evidence of what happened at Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza” [Npr.org/2023/10/18/18/1206795861]
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 shows a rocket launching from a site west of the hospital, but it is not a real video. The rocket appears to break apart high above the hospital moments before the blast.
The explosion occurred in the hospital’s operating room, according to Dr. Naim. Upon hearing the blast, he rushed outside to find horrific injuries to the people in the courtyard, including amputated limbs and vascular injuries, he said. “Some of them died in our hands,” he said.
“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 damage caused to the hospital is inconsistent with the types of bombs and shells used by Israel.
Israeli attacks on Israel: “It’s like a perfect storm for chaos” by ISIR militants, according to Garlasco
Death estimates vary greatly, 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.” 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.
“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 pushed out more notifications after they changed their headline to reflect the counterclaim from Israel. The updated headline from The New York Times read: “At least 500 dead in blast at Gaza hospital, Palestinians say.”
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 New York Times researcher, pointed out that the time stamp on the video said 8 pm local time, a full hour after the explosion.