What Gaza Hospital Strike Video Released by Israel Reveals

Israel has released a video that it says shows that Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian armed group, was responsible for the blast at a hospital in Gaza City that killed hundreds.

Palestinian officials said an Israeli airstrike hit the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital on Tuesday evening with the Palestinian Authority's health minister accusing Israel of causing a "massacre."

A Gaza civil defense chief said 300 people had died while Gaza Health Ministry sources put it at 500, according to Reuters. But Israel has blamed a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group, which has denied responsibility.

Amid the claims and counterclaims, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released a video on social media from the Israeli Air Force (IAF) which it said showed aerial footage around the site before and after the blast.

The 33-second clip released on Wednesday morning gained over one million views within two hours. It starts with an aerial view, likely to be drone footage, of the hospital compound next to a still image on the right taken from the ground of the fiery aftermath of the blast. "Fire as a result of a failed launch by the Islamic Jihad terror organization," says the caption under the image of the fire.

The clip segues into a circling aerial shot with superimposed graphics that show the outline of the compound as well as the parking lot which it describes as the "site of the fire." Then there is a dissolve into two infrared images side by side purportedly comparing the hospital site on Sunday with the scene after the blast, two days later, at roughly the same time, 11 p.m.

There is a glow in the footage from Tuesday night at the explosion site and a caption that says there is shrapnel on the roof of one of the buildings.

The following images compare aerial footage of Tuesday's blast with examples of craters caused by IAF ordnance. On the left-hand side, the footage of the hospital shows "no visible signs or craters or significant damage to buildings."

The image on the right-hand side taken on Monday purports to show two craters, 7 meters (21 feet) and 19 meters (57 feet) in diameter respectively, caused by IAF ordnance.

"A failed rocket launch by the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization hit the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City," said the IDF post on X, formerly Twitter, next to the video.

"IAF footage from the area around the hospital before and after the failed rocket launch by the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization."

In a news conference on Wednesday, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said that "any aerial munition," namely Israeli missiles, would not have caused the damage that was seen but greater damage, repeating earlier claims that Israeli believes this is the work of a rocket that failed to launch properly.

"At 6:15PM, a barrage of rockets was fired by Hamas at Israel," he said.
"At 6:59PM a barrage of around 10 rockets was fired by Islamic Jihad from a nearby cemetery.
"It was at the time, 6:59PM—when there were reports of an explosion at the hospital in Gaza City.
"According to our intelligence, Hamas checked the reports, understood it was an Islamic Jihad rocket that had misfired—and decided to launch a global media campaign to hide what really happened."

Following the blasts, protests took place at Israel's embassies in Turkey and Jordan and near the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon. Palestinian security forces dispersed anti-government protesters in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.

Meanwhile, Jordan cancelled a planned summit with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and U.S. President Joe Biden whose trip to the region was hoped to quell tensions.

Biden said on Wednesday morning that the strike on the hospital was not caused by Israel.

"Based on what I've seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you," he said at a press conference in Tel Aviv with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "But there's a lot of people out there not sure, so we have to overcome a lot of things."

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