The Israeli military presented on Wednesday a fuller explanation of why it blames an armed Palestinian group, rather than its own forces, for a catastrophic blast at a Gazan hospital on Tuesday night.
Citing aerial footage, publicly available images taken in the aftermath and recordings it said were of Hamas members, the Israel Defense Forces said the explosion was caused by a rocket that misfired after being launched by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an armed group allied with Hamas, that hit the Ahli Arab hospital.
The group has denied the claim, and the Hamas-run Gazan health ministry said that an Israeli strike caused the blast, which it said killed hundreds of Palestinians.
Neither side’s claims could be independently verified and Hamas has not provided any documentation of Israeli involvement.
In a press briefing on Wednesday morning, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, said that Islamic Jihad fired 10 rockets at 6:59 p.m. local time. One of the rockets, he said, fell to earth prematurely, hitting a parking lot outside the hospital. He said that Israel had not fired any ordnance in the area of the hospital at that time.
“According to our intelligence, Hamas checked the report, understood it was an Islamic Jihad rocket that had misfired, and decided to launch a global media campaign to hide what really happened,” Rear Adm. Hagari said in the briefing.
“They went as far as inflating the numbers of casualties,” the admiral added.
He cited a photograph of the parking lot that was posted on social media on Wednesday morning that he said did not show the kind of impact that would have been caused by an Israeli missile.
The photo shows the effects of a fire — burned-out cars and scorched ground. Admiral Hagari said that the damage was caused by rocket fuel that caught fire after hitting the ground.
He also showed an aerial image that he said was taken from a military drone overnight. In the image, he said, there was no evidence of a crater caused by an Israeli missile.
And he dismissed suggestions that the strike was caused by an errant Israeli air defense interceptor; he said Israel does not fire air defense missiles into Gazan airspace.
The admiral played a recording of what he said was a wiretapped conversation between two Hamas members, in which one speaker says the damage was caused by a rocket fired by Islamic Jihad from a cemetery near the hospital. The New York Times is assessing the material and has not verified the conversation.
