Question: Does it matter who actually fired the rocket that killed hundreds at the al Ahli Hospital in Gaza?
Answer: Yes it matters because if it can be established that it was Israel, this would massively affect public opinion in the US, which is the most important supporter of Israel.
Close up view of crater caused by the rocket and a view in relation to Gaza as a whole. It seems to show that the rocket was fired from the Northeast, that is, from the direction of Israeli forces.
So far, the news tends to support Israel’s claim that it was an errant rocket fired by Islamic Jihad, but a deeper analysis casts serious doubt on that. A Channel 4 (British TV) forensic analysis of both the doppler sound effect and of the crater itself seems to indicate that the rocket was fired from the north-east, meaning from the direction of Israeli forces.
Shortly after the hospital parking lot was bombed, Israel produced an audio recording that it claims was a conversation between two members of Hamas in which they say Islamic Jihad fired the rocket. Channel 4 showed that that recording was heavily edited/stitched together. Furthermore, other Palestinians say that those two speakers didn’t even talk with a Gazan accent. So, it seems most likely that that recording was faked. Not only that, but it seems like it was prepared in advance.
Here’s another scenario:
As we have pointed out before, Al Jazeera has reported that the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) “pointed out that there had actually been over 51 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza since the start of the conflict on October 7. They wrote, “The Israeli military itself had issued evacuation orders last week from 22 hospitals treating more than 2,000 patients in the Gaza Strip… A senior health official in Gaza told Al Jazeeera that Israel had fired two artillery shells as a ‘warning’ at al-Ahli Arab Hospital days before the explosion.”
So, Israel was trying to force evacuation of the hospital. They must have known that hitting the hospital with a shell like what they use to destroy residential buildings would cause an international scandal, including in the United States. So, under this scenario, maybe they fired a rocket without a major explosive head and aimed at the parking lot, figuring it would not cause major damage. This would have been a stepped up warning to try to force evacuation of the hospital, something we know they had been trying to accomplish. But they miscalculated the effect of the resulting fireball.
We can’t be sure, but based on the forensic evidence produced by Channel 4, that seems one possible scenario.
Close up view of crater caused by the rocket and a view in relation to Gaza as a whole. It seems to show that the rocket was fired from the Northeast, that is, from the direction of Israeli forces.
Categories: Middle East, war
Gosh, who could have possibly predicted this? That the same nation that’s deliberately targeted medics and journalists, the same nation that’s used white phosphorus on living targets, the same nation that’s killed children for throwing stones at tanks, might possibly blow up a hospital?
I watched the Channel 4 report, and think that the net effect is to move the “whodunnit” needle back to the middle. A necessary assumption is that the Israelis deliberately downsized the warhead for a “plausible deniability” that would move the needle towards Islamic Jihad.
In that case the IDF was pretty dumb! After all, they could have readily arraigned to launch from Israeli territory SW of Gaza City, in general parallel to typical missile launches from the Gaza direction, to cover their forensic tracks.
Neither can we draw any definitive conclusions nor can we ignore the evidence that it seems the missile came from the direction of the Israeli troops. Most times in criminal cases, we can listen to the prosecutor and be absolutely convinced that the accused is guilty. Then we listen to the defense attorney and be like, “wait a minute, here. There’s a lot of flaws in those arguments.” If Israel did in fact launch the missile and if they did, in fact, downsize the type to make it seem like it came from Hamas, who knows why it was launched from where it seems it was and not from SW of Gaza City? Who knows what complications may have existed? We just don’t know all the details and probably never will.