Following an apparent missile strike at a packed Gaza hospital on Tuesday night, a great number of the most esteemed Western publications immediately jumped to conclusions and presented Hamas’ one-sided narrative as fact without any verification of the claims whatsoever and without any further thought about what harm it would cause in fueling the already bloody conflict. The picture is much more complete after a few days have passed, so let us see what really happened at Al-Ahli Hospital that night in light of all available evidence.
First facts: a rocket hit the parking lot of the Al-Ahli Hospital, located in Gaza City, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday evening. With no other sources on the ground at the time, the only available information on the impact was provided by the Gazan Health Ministry, run by Hamas. According to its official communication, the death toll at the hospital surpassed 500, with many more wounded, in what the ministry claimed was an Israeli airstrike.
This is the story that was reported by most legacy media publications throughout the West—including the BBC, CNN, Sky News, and The New York Times—spreading the narrative that Israel murdered five hundred civilians in a hospital. Not only did many not assess the Israeli counterclaims seriously, but they did not even take into account further information and inconsistencies coming out of Gaza.
For one, the Hamas-run Health Ministry revised the death toll during the same night, changing the number from 500 to “hundreds.” On Wednesday, the Palestinian authorities presented more accurate figures again, saying that 471 people were killed and hundreds more wounded in the attack. However, according to the nearby Shifa Hospital, where both the survivors and the bodies were taken, the blast killed between 150 and 200 people, wounding around 300 more.
It’s not hard to imagine a great number of people were crammed into the Al-Ahli Hospital due to the current refugee situation, but the initial numbers should still have raised an immediate alarm, considering that the building has only 80 beds, according to the website of the Anglican Church that oversees it.
Israel, on the other hand, provided much more evidence. According to Tel Aviv’s version of events, the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket launched from inside Gaza. Video footage shows that Gazan militants fired a barrage of ten rockets at 6:59 p.m. from a site not far from the hospital, with an explosion clearly visible on the ground seconds later, directly under the trajectory of the missiles.
According to Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari of the IDF, the errant rocket was part of that initial volley, fired by the Hamas-adjacent Islamic Jihad group, before falling back to the ground and hitting Al-Ahli Hospital’s parking lot.
The IDF also released aerial drone footage to accompany the already circulating close-up pictures of the explosion site, showing a lack of a large, visible impact crater or extensive structural damage to the nearby buildings, with only scorched earth and burned-out cars—consistent with fire damage caused by burning fuel from a malfunctioning missile.
Furthermore, the IDF published intercepted communication between Hamas operatives, in which one of them admits the blast was indeed caused by a misfired rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the cemetery just behind the Al-Ahli Hospital.
Naturally, the Islamic Jihad denied any involvement, despite the fact that the militant group announced it had fired a barrage of missiles towards Israel at 7:09 p.m., minutes after the explosion. According to the terrorists, however, the timing of the post is not indicative of when the rockets were fired, adding that they don’t make “mistakes of this size.”
Let us not forget third-party verification either. According to U.S. National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson, Washington “assesses that Israel was not responsible” for the explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital “based on available reporting, including intelligence, missile activity, and open-source video and images of the incident,” adding that U.S. intelligence indicates the blast was indeed caused by an errant Palestinian rocket.
Other Defense Department officials concurred, saying that there are multiple strands of early intelligence—such as infrared satellite data—to support the hypothesis, with one senior official saying the U.S. is now “fairly confident” the missile did not come from Israel.
“Based on data I was shown by my Defense Department,” U.S. President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Netanyahu during his Wednesday visit to Tel Aviv, “it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you.”
As for the “open-source” information everyone refers to, it’s worth looking at the independent investigations done by social media users in the early hours. A deeper look at the publicly available images leaves no doubt that it was a mass casualty event but clearly calls for a massive revision of Hamas’ official death toll while showing damage that’s largely inconsistent with standard IDF weaponry.
Naturally, all this information has been assessed by mainstream publications as they became public over the past day, but the damage has already been done. What’s ironic is that the mainstream media fell for a global disinformation campaign endorsed by the outspoken allies Russia and China after spending two years detesting anyone who gave a second thought to Russian disinformation with regard to Ukraine.
What’s more, The New York Times—the publication that changed its initial headline twice, going from “Israeli strike” to “strike” to “blast” in less than a day—ran a piece just two years ago titled “Lies on Social Media Inflame Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”—calling out the very thing they now seem to partake in, for apparent ideological reasons.
