Blast kills hundreds at Gaza hospital; Hamas and Israel trade blame

Warning: graphic content

Khan Younis, Gaza Strip: A massive blast has rocked a Gaza City hospital packed with wounded and other Palestinians seeking shelter, killing hundreds, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said. Hamas blamed an Israeli airstrike, while the Israeli military said the hospital was hit by a rocket misfired by Palestinian militants.

The explosion at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in central Gaza.Credit: Husam Zomlot/X

The Gaza Health Ministry said at least 500 people were killed at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital on Tuesday local time (Wednesday morning AEDT).

The Palestinian Authority’s health minister, Mai Alkaila, accused Israel of “a massacre” at the hospital. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “barbaric terrorists” in Gaza had attacked the hospital, not Israel’s military.

Video that The Associated Press confirmed was from the hospital showed fire engulfing the building and the hospital’s grounds strewn with torn bodies, many of them young children. Around them in the grass were blankets, school backpacks and other belongings.

Outrage over what many believed was an Israeli strike flared across the region, a day before US President Joe Biden was due to arrive to show support for Israel and to try to prevent the war from spreading.

Spokesman Daniel Hagari said the Israeli military would publish a recording of militants in Gaza blaming to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Israeli government is expected to share the information with Biden when he arrives. Biden will meet with Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet and seek a sense of Israel’s plans and objectives in the days and weeks ahead, White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Air Force One during the flight to Tel Aviv.

“He’ll be asking some tough questions, he’ll be asking them as a friend, as a true friend of Israel, but he’ll be asking some questions of them,” Kirby said.

Israel is expected to launch a ground offensive in Gaza; the United States has been pressing Israelis to allow humanitarian aid in to help civilians.

The carnage unfolded as the US tried to convince Israel to allow the delivery of supplies to desperate civilians, aid groups and hospitals in the tiny Gaza Strip, which has been under a complete siege since Hamas’ deadly rampage in southern Israel last week.

Hamas called the hospital blast a horrific massacre.

The Israeli military blamed Islamic Jihad, a smaller, more radical Palestinian militant group that often co-operates with Hamas in their shared struggle against Israel.

The military said Islamic Jihad militants had fired a barrage of rockets near the hospital at the time and that “intelligence from multiple sources” indicated it was “responsible for the failed rocket launch that hit the hospital”.

The Israeli government’s X/Twitter account later edited a tweet to remove what appeared to be video evidence of the strike after The New York Times noted the clip was recorded 40 minutes after the time of the Gaza hospital explosion.

Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City last week.Credit: AP

Hundreds of Palestinians had taken refuge in Al Ahli and other hospitals in Gaza City in past days, hoping they would be spared bombardment after Israel ordered all residents of the city and surrounding areas to evacuate to the southern Gaza Strip.

Ambulances and private cars rushed about 350 casualties from the Al Ahli blast to Gaza City’s main hospital, Al Shifa, which was already overwhelmed with wounded from other strikes, said its director, Mohammed Abu Selmia. The wounded were laid onto bloody floors, screaming in pain.

“We are squeezing five beds into a single tiny room. We need equipment, we need medicine, we need beds, we need anaesthesia, we need everything,” Abu Selmia said, warning that the fuel supply for the hospital’s generators would run out Wednesday. “I think Gaza’s medical sector will collapse within hours.”

Before the Al Ahli Arab Hospital deaths, Israeli strikes on Gaza killed at least 2778 people and wounded 9700, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Nearly two-thirds of those killed were children, a ministry official said. Another 1200 people across Gaza are believed to be buried under the rubble, alive or dead, health authorities said.

Hamas’ attack in southern Israel on October 7 killed more than 1400 people, mostly civilians, and took about 200 captive into Gaza. Hamas militants in Gaza have launched rockets every day since, aiming at cities across Israel.

In protest over the purported airstrike, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas cancelled his participation in a meeting with Biden, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egypt’s president set for Wednesday in Amman, Jordan, to discuss the war. Abbas’ Palestinian Authority runs parts of the West Bank.

Hundreds of Palestinians flooded the streets of major West Bank cities including Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, where protesters hurled stones at Palestinian security forces who fired back with stun grenades.

Others threw stones at Israeli checkpoints, where soldiers killed one Palestinian, West Bank authorities said. Hundreds joined protests that erupted in Beirut and Amman, where an angry crowd gathered outside the Israeli embassy.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah denounced what the group said was Israel’s deadly attack on a Gaza hospital and called for “a day of unprecedented anger” on Wednesday, as protests erupted outside the US embassy in Beirut just hours after the incident.

The blast drew condemnation across the Arab world, and protests were staged at Israel’s embassies in Turkey and Jordan and near the US embassy in Lebanon, where security forces fired tear gas toward demonstrators.

Television footage showed protests in Yemen’s southwestern city of Taz, as well as in the Moroccan capital Rabat and Iraq’s capital, Baghdad.

Biden’s visit in part aims to prevent the war from sparking a broader regional conflict. Violence flared on Tuesday along Israel’s border with Lebanon, where Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants operate and where Israel has evacuated nearby towns.

With tens of thousands of troops massed along the border, Israel has been expected to launch a ground invasion into Gaza, but its plans remained uncertain.

“We are preparing for the next stages of war,” military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Hecht said. “We haven’t said what they will be. Everybody’s talking about a ground offensive. It might be something different.”

Throughout the day on Tuesday, airstrikes killed dozens of civilians and at least one senior Hamas figure in the southern half of the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli military told fleeing Palestinians to go. An Associated Press reporter saw about 50 bodies brought to Nasser Hospital after strikes in the southern city of Khan Younis.

An airstrike in Deir al Balah reduced a house to rubble, killing a man and 11 women and children inside and in a neighbouring house, some of whom had evacuated from Gaza City. Witnesses said there was no warning before the strike.

Shelling from Israeli tanks hit a United Nations school in central Gaza where 4000 Palestinians had taken refuge, killing six people and wounding dozens, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency said. At least 24 UN installations have been hit the past week, killing at least 14 members of the agency’s staff.

The Israeli military said it was targeting Hamas hideouts, infrastructure and command centres.

A barrage of strikes crashed into the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, levelling an entire block of homes and causing dozens of casualties among families inside, residents said. Among those killed was one of Hamas’ top military commanders, Ayman Nofal, the group’s military wing said, the highest-profile militant known to have been killed so far in the war.

Nofal, formerly the intelligence chief of Hamas’ armed wing, was in charge of Hamas militant activities in the central Gaza Strip, including co-ordinating activities with other militant groups.

Netanyahu sought to put the blame on Hamas for Israel’s retaliatory attacks and the rising civilian casualties in Gaza. “Not only is it targeting and murdering civilians with unprecedented savagery, it’s hiding behind civilians,” he said.

In Gaza City, Israeli airstrikes also hit the house of Hamas’ top political official, Ismail Haniyeh, killing at least 14 people. Haniyeh is based in Doha, Qatar, but his family lives in Gaza City. The Hamas media office did not immediately identify those killed.

With Israel barring entry of water, fuel and food into Gaza since Hamas’ brutal attack last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken secured an agreement with Netanyahu to discuss the creation of a mechanism for delivering aid to the territory’s 2.3 million people. US officials said the gain might appear modest, but stressed that it was a significant step forward.

US President Joe Biden said on Tuesday he was “outraged” by the explosion at a Gaza hospital that killed about 500 people and said he had directed his national security team to gather information about exactly what had happened.

“I am outraged and deeply saddened by the explosion at the Al Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza, and the terrible loss of life that resulted,” Biden, who is travelling to Israel, said in a statement.

“The United States stands unequivocally for the protection of civilian life during conflict and we mourn the patients, medical staff and other innocents killed or wounded in this tragedy.”

Still, as of late Tuesday, no deal was in place. A top Israeli official said his country was demanding guarantees that Hamas militants would not seize any aid deliveries. Tzahi Hanegbi, head of Israel’s National Security Council, suggested entry of aid also depended on the return of hostages held by Hamas.

“The return of the hostages, which is sacred in our eyes, is a key component in any humanitarian efforts,” he told reporters, without elaborating.

More than 1 million Palestinians have fled their homes – roughly half of Gaza’s population – and 60 per cent are now in the approximately 14-kilometre-long area south of the evacuation zone, the UN said.

Aid workers warned that the territory was near complete collapse. Hospitals were on the verge of losing electricity, threatening the lives of thousands of patients, and hundreds of thousands of people searched for bread and water.

The UN agency for Palestinians said more than 400,000 displaced people were crowded into schools and other facilities in the south with little food or water.

Israel opened a water line into the south for three hours that benefited only 14 per cent of Gaza’s population, the UN said.

At the Rafah crossing, Gaza’s only connection to Egypt, truckloads of aid were waiting to enter. The World Food Program said that it had more than 300 tonnes of food waiting to cross into Gaza.

Civilians with foreign citizenship – many of them Palestinians with dual nationalities – also waited in Rafah, desperate to get out.

AP, Reuters

More coverage of the Hamas-Israel conflict

• Cascading violence: Tremors from the Hamas attacks and Israel’s response have reached far beyond the border. But what would all-out war in the Middle East look like?
• The human cost: Hamas’ massacre in Israel has traumatised – and hardened – survivors. And in Gaza, neighourhoods have become ghost cities.
• “Hamas metro”: Inside the labyrinthine network of underground tunnels, which the Palestinian militant group has commanded beneath war-ravaged Gaza for 16 years. The covert corridors have long provided essential channels for the movement of weapons and armed combatants.
• What is Hezbollah?: As fears of the conflict expanding beyond Israel and Hamas steadily rise, all eyes are on the militant group and political party that controls southern Lebanon and has been designated internationally as a terrorist group. How did it form and what does Iran have to do with it?

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