Israel army says rocket misfired by Gaza militants hit hospital
The Israeli army claims a strike that hit a Gaza hospital, killing at least 200 people according to Hamas officials, was a rocket misfired by Islamic Jihad Palestinian militants.
An explosion rocked a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday, killing hundreds in one of the deadliest single incidents of violence in the strip — hours before President Biden was expected to visit Israel in a show of support.
Hamas and Palestinian officials blamed Israel and said at least 500 people were killed. Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office said there were “clear indications” that the blast was a misfire by the militant Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which the group denied. The source of the explosion couldn’t be immediately verified.
The decimation of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital — founded in the 1880s by Anglican missionaries — reverberated across the Arab world, causing street protests and up-ending delicate diplomatic efforts to free hostages and create safe passage out of Gaza for foreign nationals. In Saudi Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had been pursuing a normalisation pact with Israel, a royal adviser said the idea was now dead.
The explosion, and the allegation that Israel was responsible, jeopardised years of efforts to build goodwill toward the Jewish state in the Arab and wider Muslim world. New diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and elsewhere were established in 2020 and developed over three years when the low-simmering conflict in the West Bank was the biggest obstacle to peace — not hundreds of dead people in a hospital.
Footage aired by Al Jazeera showed rescue workers, medical staff and civilians responding to the strike on Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, stepping over bodies on the ground as they carried out other bodies in blankets and white plastic sheets. Burnt-out cars sat in the area, blood pooled among the rubble and dazed patients wandered into the street, the footage showed.
“The massacre at al-Ahli Arab Hospital is unprecedented in our history,” said Palestinian Authority Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal. “While we’ve witnessed tragedies in past wars and days, but what took place tonight is tantamount to a genocide.”
As Biden took off for Israel on Tuesday night, a White House official said the president was postponing his travel to Jordan for a regional summit on Gaza after consulting with its leader, King Abdullah II, and “in light of the days of mourning” announced by Palestinian leader.
Biden, while en route to Tel Aviv, said he had directed his national security team to find out what exactly 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 said.
Biden plans to ask some “tough questions” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials while discussing their intentions and objectives as the conflict continues, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters aboard Air Force One. But Biden will reaffirm U.S. support for Israel during the visit, which Washington has said is also aimed at deterring a broader regional conflict.
“We want to deter any actor — be it a state or a terrorist group — from widening and escalating,” Kirby said.
Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari said in a briefing early Wednesday morning that no Israeli strike, either by air, land or sea occurred near the hospital at the time of the deadly explosion. He said the Israeli military would soon publish the radar information, footage and a recording of militants in Gaza assigning blame to Islamic Jihad, a group aligned with Hamas.
Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour accused Israel of carrying out the strike and lying. “Now they change the story to try to blame the Palestinians. It is a lie,” Mansour said during a press conference at the U.N. headquarters.
While Washington has expressed unconditional solidarity with Israel, it has also signalled that it wants to minimise civilian casualties from the bombing of targets in Gaza and the ground incursion that is expected to follow.
RAW FOOTAGE: A rocket aimed at Israel misfired and exploded at 18:59—the same moment a hospital was hit in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/Kf5xJazSap
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 17, 2023
Jordan announced that it was cancelling the planned regional summit in Amman. Earlier, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said he was calling off a scheduled meeting with Biden in Jordan “following the great tragedy that befell the Palestinian people.”
Egypt condemned the explosion, calling it “a dangerous violation” of international humanitarian law.
Despite the summit’s cancellation, Biden was scheduled to speak with key Arab leaders by phone and planned to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza during his trip to Israel with a focus on getting international aid to the besieged enclave, Kirby said.
The Biden administration has been seeking to achieve a complicated set of goals following the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, among the most devastating in the country’s history. The U.S. wants to ensure aid enters Gaza and that Americans and other foreigners can leave. It also wants to prevent the conflict in Gaza from spiralling into a broader conflagration involving Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Iran, which both support Hamas, as well as Syria, where Hezbollah is also present.
In recent days, the Israeli military ordered more than one million Palestinians in the northern part of Gaza to evacuate to the southern part. Israel had called for the evacuation of more than 20 hospitals, which the World Health Organization said would worsen the humanitarian catastrophe there. Before Tuesday’s strike, the WHO had documented 48 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza, resulting in damage to six hospitals, since Oct. 7.
Hospitals in northern Gaza have ignored Israeli warnings to evacuate because there aren’t enough beds at hospitals in the south to accommodate patients, according to doctors. Many patients can’t be transported on roads that are damaged or blocked with debris from days of Israeli bombing, especially newborn babies in incubators or patients on ventilators.
A woman living near the hospital said Tuesday’s explosion was so large, she thought it had hit her building.
“We saw a huge mountain of fire rising up into the sky and we instantly knew that this is the Ahli Arab Hospital,” she said, adding that hundreds of families had moved there from their homes.
“They thought that taking refuge inside the hospital would be even safer because nobody bombs a hospital. Have you ever heard of anyone bombing a hospital?”
The blast sent a wave of fear across Gaza’s hospital system, with doctors worried that their facilities, too, would be targeted. Each clinic and hospital was already operating at its maximum capacity, not only trying to treat patients but sheltering sometimes thousands of people who had to flee their homes.
Dead bodies in bags were piling up, often just on the outside premises of hospitals. Ambulances pulled up to hospital entrances to deliver wounded patients non-stop.
Casualties from Al-Ahli were getting rushed a 10-minute drive away to Al Shifa Hospital, one of the largest medical facilities in Gaza that was already overflowing. Doctors there had received 6,000 injured patients, according to Mohamed Abu Salmiya, head of that hospital.
“We have to leave [people] to face their fate,” he said. “We cannot deal with everyone.”
Dr. Zaher Sahloul, president of international non-profit MedGlobal which has operations at nearby Kamal Adwan hospital, said doctors there were receiving patients from Al Ahli whose bodies were burned, mutilated and full of shrapnel.
“It’s an impossible situation for the medical community,” he said. “It makes everyone feel unsafe. Hospitals should be a safe place for patients, for nurses, for doctors, for families. they should not be a target of bombing, no matter what the reason.”
The explosion at the hospital came after an intense 24 hours of bombing by Israeli warplanes in Gaza. Facilities being used as emergency shelters had already been hit by Israeli airstrikes, according to a U.N. report.
Israeli shelling on Tuesday hit a U.N. school serving as a shelter for 4,000 people, killing at least six people and injuring dozens, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency said Tuesday.
“No place is safe in Gaza anymore, not even Unrwa facilities,” the agency said in a statement.
Overnight Monday and into Tuesday, Israeli warplanes hit what the military described as Hamas’s operational headquarters, as well as some of the tunnels used by Hamas fighters and a bank the military said had helped finance the Islamist group’s operations.
In a sign of the toll the bombardment is taking on the group, Hamas said Tuesday that the commander of the central brigade of its military wing, Ayman Nofal “Abu Ahmed,” had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Nofal was a member of the group’s General Military Council, it said.
Israel’s pounding of targets in Gaza had been expected to pave the way for a potential ground offensive. But in a briefing Tuesday morning, Israeli military spokesman Richard Hecht said Israel hadn’t yet committed to a ground invasion of Gaza, though the military was preparing for one.
Experts think fighting in the strip’s densely populated cities, under which Hamas has dug an extensive network of tunnels, could end up being very costly for Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians alike.
The death toll in Gaza stood at about 3,000 before the hospital explosion, according to Gaza health authorities. In its Oct. 7 attack, Hamas killed at least 1,400 Israelis and took hostages, according to Israeli authorities.
The precise number of hostages being held isn’t known. A spokesman for the armed wing of Hamas said Monday that the group alone was holding around 200 people hostage, with at least 50 others held by other factions. It is unclear if that includes about 22 hostages that Hamas says have been killed during Israeli airstrikes.
In Gaza, aid groups called on the international community to allow water, medical supplies and fuel in as people continued to wait for the opening of the Rafah crossing, at the border between Egypt and Gaza, to let aid in and foreigners out. MedGlobal, a U.S.-based charity working in Gaza, said the situation was at “breaking point” after Israel had imposed a blockade of the movement of goods and people in and out of the Palestinian enclave.
“Children are dying. Parents are dying. Entire generations are being wiped out in front of our eyes,” Hussam Abu Safiya, MedGlobal’s lead physician in Gaza, said Tuesday.
The U.N. said Monday evening that fuel reserves at hospitals across Gaza were expected to last only 24 hours longer and that a shutdown of backup generators would place thousands of patients’ lives at risk. A U.N. spokeswoman said Tuesday night that fuel in Gaza is “on the brink of depletion.”
Summer Said, Dov Lieber, Stephen Kalin, Chao Deng, Menna Farouk and Abu Bakr Bashir contributed to this article.
The Wall Street Journal
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