Just before 7 p.m. on Tuesday in Gaza City, a fiery explosion erupted at the al-Ahli Hospital, leaving scores of Palestinian civilians dead. Hamas and the Hamas-run health ministry immediately claimed an Israeli airstrike destroyed the hospital, killing at least 500 people. Israel, after a brief investigation, said it was not responsible, blaming the blast on a failed Israel-bound rocket fired by a second militant group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Neighboring Arab leaders blamed and denounced Israel, and outraged anti-Israel and anti-U.S. protests erupted across the Middle East.
By Wednesday morning, photos and video of the site appeared to show a small crater in the central parking lot of the lightly damaged hospital, surrounded by burned-out cars and a lawn strewn with scores of dead bodies.
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The Gaza health ministry lowered its death toll to 471; the Israeli Defense Forces said Hamas was inflating the casualties. A doctor at the hospital, owned and run by the Anglican Church, said about 3,000 Palestinians had been crowded into the courtyard to escape Israel's bombing campaign; a local Anglican official told BBC that about 1,000 people were sheltering at the hospital at the time.
President Biden, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the National Security Council said U.S. analyses of intelligence and open-source visual data pointed to a failed Palestinian rocket, not Israel, causing the blast. A Pentagon official told The New York Times the U.S. was "fairly confident" the failed rocket did not come from Israeli forces, but a lot remained unknown.
BBC's Verify unit examined available footage and spoke to several experts who agreed the damage "is not consistent with what you would expect from a typical Israeli airstrike with a large munition," though no definitive conclusions could be reached without an independent on-scene analysis.
CNN military analyst Mark Hertling explained how the evidence — small crater, intact buildings, conflagration from unused rocket fuel — was consistent with the failure of the kind of Iranian-supplied rockets used by Gaza militants.
Britain's Channel 4 News agreed that an Israeli airstrike did not fit the evidence, though it was more skeptical of Israel's explanation, noting inconsistencies and the IDF's past targeting of the hospital.
Marc Garalasco, a former military targeting analyst now at PAX Protection of Civilians, told PBS NewsHour that a failed Palestinian rocket was the most plausible explanation. But he also urged a ceasefire, noting that civilians were taking the brunt of the pain whenever either side attacked.
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