The Israeli Massacre At Al-Ahli Hospital In Gaza: Fact vs Fiction

On Tuesday, October 17, it was reported that an Israeli airstrike was carried out against the al-Ahli Hospital in the besieged Gaza Strip, killing at least 500 people and sparking a public out-roar across the Middle East. After realizing the sheer scope of the bloody massacre that was carried out, the Israeli government instantly took to their social media accounts, before later releasing audio and video footage in an attempt to blame the strike on Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The information released has worked to convince some Western audiences and has been carried by US President Joe Biden himself. So, were the original reports from eye witnesses and international media incorrect, or does Israel have an agenda in distancing itself from the massacre?

In order to properly interrogate Israel’s counterclaims, first we must set the relevant context. We now hear, mainly from Western politicians and pro-Israel commentators, that Israel would have no incentive to strike such a civilian target and that there is no clear evidence for what truly happened. Some also say that the claims that Israel carried out the massacre are all sourced from Hamas. This, before getting to any actual evidence, we must first address.

“Israel wouldn’t do this… It has no reason”

To begin with, the Israeli military had directly threatened 22 hospitals inside the Gaza strip in the days leading up to the attack on the al-Ahli, in what the World Health Organisation (WHO) had branded a “death sentence”. Calls were received from the hospitals, warning them to evacuate or face the consequences, as Israel informed them that they intended to strike them as legitimate targets. There has been no intelligence information presented to suggest that any military presence exists at the hospitals, nor is it feasible for the hospitals to evacuate, not least of which is because there are wounded patients inside who cannot be abandoned, along with families who have decided to take shelter at the hospitals after their homes no longer remained safe or were destroyed due to Israeli bombing.

Hospital director surrounded by bodies says Israel said we warned you yesterday with 2 bombs why didnt you evacuate?
If you can watch this & still justify it
Explain it away
Blame it on Hamas
I’m afraid you have lost your humanity

Say no to war#PalestineGenocide pic.twitter.com/BfSqCKo2KB

— Dr Ahmad Malik (@DocAhmadMalik) October 18, 2023

So far, during Israel’s war against the Gaza Strip, there has not been a single high-value military target that has been struck inside the besieged coastal enclave and the Israeli government has made it clear that they are working their war in phases. We know that Israel has not struck any high value military targets, because the Israeli military are yet to even announce that they have achieved this, while we have no reports from within Gaza indicating this either. In an interview on CNN, an Israeli soldier, Betzal Taljah, clearly states that “this is not just a war with Hamas, the war [is] with all the civilians“, which aligns with the targets that have been reportedly hit in Gaza.

“I tried to correct you.. the war is not just with Hamas…the war is with all the civilians..”

Israeli soldier Betzal Taljah is given space to correct a CNN presenter that Israel’s war in Gaza is in fact against civilians.pic.twitter.com/8d9h04uLTR

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) October 16, 2023

“These animals can no longer live.”

Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old Israeli army reservist, is seen inciting “every Jew with a weapon” to kill Palestinians and “erase the memory of them” pic.twitter.com/LUQs0XoR5U

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) October 13, 2023

However, some may say that Betzal Taljah doesn’t represent the whole Israeli military or he wasn’t supposed to say this. So, in this case, we must go further. Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, stated from the onset of the military operation that the war will take as long as is needed to finish Hamas. On Wednesday, Israeli Minister Benny Gantz — who is part of the emergency war government — said that the war could take months. We then need only pair this with what Israel has done in the Gaza Strip, namely through cutting off all humanitarian aid from entering the occupied territory; including clean water, food and medical supplies. Gaza is currently cut off from aid, water and power, while 1.1 million people have been made homeless due to the Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure and the UN shelters are currently at full capacity. Although Israel has been pressured to accept allowing limited aid in, from the Egyptian border side, it has repeatedly prevented this and even bombed the Rafah border crossing after announcing on two separate days that the aid convoys would be allowed to cross at 9am.

Unbelievable.

Even the apartheid regime mouthpiece CNN says the objective is to starve and dehydrate the Palestinian people and prevent access to medicine in order to force them into submission.

When the West wants an excuse to commit genocide, they just say, “This is a war.” pic.twitter.com/U5L6H8PTpT

— Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) October 15, 2023

Between October 7 and October 18, the WHO confirmed 136 Israeli attacks on healthcare, of which 74 impacted transport (ambulances), 98 impacted medical personnel and 63 impacted patients, while 41 healthcare facilities were attacked. When commentators like Ben Shapiro claim that Hamas is making all these claims, it is important to understand that the above figures are not from the Gaza Health Ministry, they are independently verified. Also, when we hear that “Hamas claims”, or “Palestinians say”, we are not told which Palestinians or what they mean by Hamas. Hamas is the governing force inside the Gaza Strip, which means that they control the Health Ministry, however, the head of the Health Ministry is fully qualified to assume his position and is not an armed combatant, nor are the journalists and eye witnesses who all testify to witnessing an Israeli airstrike at al-Ahli hospital.

We, as @UNRWA, are mourning the loss of 14 colleagues.

At least 400,000 people are now displaced in our schools & buildings in📍#Gaza

Old people, children, pregnant women, people with disabilities are just being deprived of their basic human dignity. This is a total disgrace. pic.twitter.com/JWBfx3wMpx

— UNRWA (@UNRWA) October 15, 2023

From the public statements of Israeli officials to their actions on the ground, it is clear that civilians are a valid target for Israel. Yet it would be irresponsible to simply stop there, and since there are no human rights reports that can claim to have looked at the entire scope of the attacks, we must defer to Israel’s history of assaults on Gaza. As a sample of Israel’s track record, here is a UN human rights report that accuses Israel of directly targeting and killing medical workers in Gaza during non-violent protests in 2018, and here is a UN inquiry into war crimes committed by Israeli forces, in 2014, where credible evidence is presented of Israel bombing hospitals in the besieged coastal territory. There are many more reports, from the 2012 attack, the 2021 attack, the 2022 attack, the 2008/9 attack, and other assaults on Gaza, which also document attacks on civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, UN facilities, and the list goes on, but the two reports above are perhaps some of the most striking reports that detail such atrocities.

On the question of “would Israel do this in Gaza”, the answer is clearly yes, however, we cannot yet ascertain the evidence that supports the specific reason why Israel would choose to have attacked the Al-Ahli hospital.

“Israel didn’t do it, they have produced the evidence!”

When the strike first occurred, an Israeli propagandist that was employed as part of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal digital team, Hananya Naftali, released the claim that a “terrorist base inside a hospital” was struck and that “terrorists” were killed. Naftali, knowing the site was a hospital and attempting to justify the Israeli military having struck it, worked to claim it was a military base, before deleting his tweet when the true nature of the carnage emerged. If someone in his position claims with confidence that a militant base was struck in a hospital, it either has to be put down to him being a pathological liar that makes up claims on the spot, or that he was fed a narrative that clearly backfired. Naftali, after deleting his first tweet, publishes another with the claim that the explosion was mysterious and could have been a misfired rocket, or was done purposely by Hamas in order to win public opinion over to their side. Interestingly enough, this was then “fact-checked” by Twitter revealing publicly that he had indeed deleted his previous claim stating the opposite. 

Israeli propagandists online also spread the idea that a weapons depot belonging to one of the armed groups in Gaza had exploded, but was not followed up with any official Israeli account having alleged this to be the case. Israel’s official page on Twitter then released a clip from Al-Jazeera Arabic’s live stream, where there appears to be a munition that explodes in mid-air, the only problem with this is that this footage doesn’t clearly show any munition hitting anything and the time noted on the broadcast is 18:59, whereas some reports indicate that the attack happened around 19:15, while the Guardian and other media outlets claim that it occurred at “around 19:30“. However, this is not necessarily conclusive evidence that the Al-Jazeera video showed nothing or was even from the wrong time. But the video itself, which the IDF is still using as evidence of its case, contradicts the narrative of the misfired rocket falling in the manner they present in their own map-photos. This would lead us to believe that either the video from Al-Jazeera has nothing to do with it, or that the visual depictions released by the IDF are in fact wrong.

Israel’s Official Twitter account also posted three videos that they claimed showed the attack, two of them showed no explosion at all and the third was proven to have been from August of 2022. Also, another thing that should be noted, is that an attack from a day later, filmed next to the Quds hospital in Gaza City, shares very similar traits prior to the Israeli strike on al-Ahli hospital. The Israeli military is also making another claim about the massacre, using photos which they say show no bodies anywhere near where the missile hit. Their allegation here is that the death toll has been overinflated, they use a photo showing no bodies or even people at the scene, which is clearly a lie, as there were people there filming at the time. This appears to be an Israeli attempt to downplay the size of the massacre, which would make no sense if it wasn’t their missile which caused the loss of around 500 civilian lives, but makes complete sense if they are guilty and are seeking to downplay what happened in order to have people forget. The Israeli army also made another claim, that is that their bombs cause craters, which is an outright lie, they can detonate their missiles while they are still airborne and often do, not every Israeli missile strike causes a crater. They also compare the damage to a Hamas rocket impact, but use photos from very specific angles that do not show the cars which were literally flipped upside down by the power of the explosion at al-Ahli hospital. By omitting photos of the aftermath of the explosion, it is a clear attempt to bend the facts in their own favor, similarly, they will use angles of nearby rocket fire in order to make it seem as if they were heading in the direction of the hospital, when they clearly were not.

Also, the Israeli military addressed a press conference filled with journalists, showing what they claim to be a phone call that was wire-tapped, that they say is evidence of two Hamas operatives speaking to each other about the location from which the rocket was fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). In the IDF released conversation, one of the two speakers states that PIJ fired rockets from a nearby cemetery, yet, in their visuals they claim that the rockets were not fired from the cemetery, another contradiction in their “evidence”. Channel 4 News, in the UK, conducted a brief investigation of the claims made by the Israeli army, in which they point out the contradictory nature of the two separate pieces of Israeli “evidence” and stated that “it can’t be both”. The same Channel 4 News report stated that two independent Arabic speaking journalists had investigated the audio released by the IDF, which they said is a clear fabrication due to “language, accent, dialect, syntax and tone”. The entire Channel 4 investigation is a must watch.

🇮🇱 Britain’s Channel 4 News DEBUNKS ISRAEL’s fake claim that Hamas bombed the Gaza Baptist Hospital.

Someone is going to lose their job for telling this dark truth!

pic.twitter.com/6ZEypms0cz

— Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 (@jacksonhinklle) October 19, 2023

As an anecdotal piece of evidence, even with my basic understanding of Arabic, I can clearly tell that this is a fabrication, due to it being so far from the way that Gazans speak and clearly scripted. I know this because my wife is from the Gaza Strip, when I showed my family members the audio recording — most of whom were born and raised in Gaza — the reaction was laughter at how poor they believed the job to have been. Also, I personally know fellow journalists, such as Harry Fear, who had simply tweeted out the direction from which rockets were fired in the past and were questioned by Hamas for doing so. This is why it seems unlikely that “Hamas operatives” would speak so openly about the direction of rockets. When I spoke to a contact who is close with Hamas and has chosen to remain anonymous, I was told the following:

“The Western people are the only ones who this was made for, everyone with sense knows that Hamas members use coded language to communicate about sensitive military positions, they also do not use mobile phones. If they used mobile phones, or anything that could be tracked for that matter, why would Israel be listening to them and not have bombed them? Do you think that Hamas is so stupid that they could pull off a surprise attack and enter Israel’s sensitive military sites, and then it will start using phones to talk about their allies in Jihad [PIJ]? It’s a joke!”

Similarly, Hamas and PIJ have both refuted the audio as being clearly faked, and said that neither group have a munition capable of causing such carnage. Israel’s official Twitter account also released a tweet in which they quoted the IDF spokesperson as blaming Hamas for having fired an errant rocket that caused the massacre, before later editing this out and apportioning blame to PIJ. Also, we have a video of the bomb hitting the hospital grounds from close range, where we can see the explosion caused and hear the sound of the missile itself. Various military analysts have offered their opinions about what exact munition caused the massacre, but there are no independent experts who are saying that this attack seems to be anything other than an Israeli-fired munition, specifically one supplied to it by the US.

BREAKING: The moment the Baptist Hospital in central Gaza was bombed by Israel, killing over 800 people. pic.twitter.com/Nnq2qOC9Nq

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) October 17, 2023

The US President has claimed it looks like it was from “the other team“, meaning that Israel was not responsible in his view. Interestingly, however, Joe Biden also claimed to have seen verified proof of “terrorists beheading babies”, which the White House later confirmed was false and that the President had lied. The US President also repeated the claims about Israeli women being raped, yet there has been not a single shred of evidence to support this allegation either. So when the US President, who describes the Palestinian groups as being on the “other team”, inferring that they have fully sided with Israel and hence forfeited any claim to objectivity, his word is in essence no different to that of an Israeli official. It is also unclear at this point as to whether Israel is claiming that the rocket they allege to have committed the massacre had fallen directly on the hospital grounds, or that it had exploded in mid-air and fell down to cause an explosion, because both seem to be floating around. Also, if the rocket exploded mid air, then how did a kerosine powered rocket cause such a big explosion after already exploding?

This is also far from the first time that Israel has used the claim that misfired Palestinian rockets have massacred civilians. In August of 2022 it lied about this exact same thing, which the international media ran with, taking Israel at its word. By the time I had almost finished my own investigative piece on the issue, and interviewed the families of 5 children killed in a graveyard, unnamed Israeli military officials admitted to Haaretz Newspaper that they had been responsible for the attack; but claimed it was a mistake. However, from sources on the ground, I was told that the munition fired was from a drone and therefore the likelihood of the massacre being a mistake is next to zero.

In 2006, when Israel committed its second massacre against civilians in Lebanon’s Qana, who were taking shelter at a UN facility, killing nearly 60 people in one strike, the videos of the children that were killed caused international outrage. What did Israel say about this strike? First it denied involvement, then it proceeded to claim that the bodies of the children were likely dug up from a local graveyard in order to make Israel look bad, it then later dropped this claim and stated that Hezbollah was using civilians as human shields, before eventually blaming Hezbollah for firing rockets at Israel. In another example, in 2022, Israel released misleading footage of Palestinian fighters shooting in Jenin, which was proven couldn’t have hit Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, that they later admitted to killing, by accident. When Shireen Abu Akleh was murdered by an Israeli soldier’s bullet, the US produced an investigation that whitewashed the murder, despite her being a US citizen.

Every single time Israel commits a war crime that shocks the world and garners international condemnation, it denies, blames the victim, and then eventually partially admits its guilt or simply ignores the overwhelming evidence that proves their culpability. There is no Palestinian rocket capable of committing such an explosion, no Palestinian rocket which sounds like the attack that we have video evidence documenting, and there is no evidence of a Palestinian rocket actually falling on the site. The US and Israel are biased, both have a stake in the claim that Palestinian rockets caused the massacre, while Israeli propagandists claim that independent journalists, medical workers, survivors, and NGO staff are all “Hamas sources”.

If I am to offer my opinion on the verdict so far, it is this: Israel has released a litany of contradictory information and a clearly fabricated audio-file, which points to its guilt. At the same time, we must understand that Israel had already killed in excess of 1,000 Palestinian children in Gaza prior to this attack, so it’s propensity for violence against civilians is clear. As for the direct motive, this is impossible to tell as I am not a mind reader. However, Israel’s attacks on Gaza are specifically designed to make the civilian population of the besieged territory pay the price for the Hamas attack of October 7. To date, neither Israel, nor the United States, have presented a single shred of credible evidence, which seems to indicate that they seek to muddy the waters, create a debate and distract from the ongoing massacre; which has resulted in many more than 500 civilian deaths. No one in the Arabic speaking world is even entertaining Israel’s claims, this is because the Israeli evidence was likely only created in order to convince a Western audience.