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Post by Admin on Oct 19, 2023 4:57:46 GMT
Immediately after the explosion, a Hamas member said, ''This is the first time I've seen a missile fall like this.It must have belonged to Islamic Jihad (an extremist group close to Hamas)'' and ''They fired from the cemetery behind the hospital, but it didn't explode. A recording and an English transcription of the phone call in which he allegedly said things like "I fell on them" were also released. It was concluded that the attack was an accidental rocket fired by Islamic Jihad.
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Post by Admin on Oct 19, 2023 8:23:09 GMT
On Tuesday, the IDF presented imagery that it says proves the destruction at the hospital could not have been the result of an airstrike, saying there were no visible signs of craters or significant damage to buildings that would result from such a strike.
A video posted by the official State of Israel’s account on social media platform X on Tuesday night was also presented as evidence that the hospital was struck in outgoing rocket fire from militants. But the timestamp on the video appeared not to match up with the time that the explosion took place, and the tweet was later edited to remove the video.
Israel Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lior Haiat told CNN: “We received the video, we thought it was from an official source but when we contacted him he said he got it from somewhere else, so we took it off.”
What US intelligence suggests The US government currently assesses that Israel “was not responsible” for the blast, according to the US National Security Council (NSC).
Biden, who was making a high-stakes visit to Israel on Wednesday, told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the damage at the hospital “appears as though it was done by the other team, not you.”
“But there’s a lot of people out there not sure, so we’ve got a lot – we’ve got to overcome a lot of things,” Biden added.
The NSC on Wednesday afternoon leaned further into its assessment: “Intelligence indicates that some Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip believed that the explosion was likely caused by an errant rocket or missile launch carried out by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The militants were still investigating what had happened,” spokesperson Adrienne Watson said.
Officials told CNN separately that the initial evidence gathered by the US intelligence community suggests that the hospital strike came from a rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group.
Among the evidence is a blast analysis that suggests it was a ground explosion rather than an airstrike that hit the hospital, one of the sources said. There was no singular crater suggesting there was a bomb, but there was extensive fire damage and scattered debris that is consistent with an explosion starting from the ground level, according to the source.
That analysis is one data point that’s led intelligence officials to lean toward assessing that the attack on the hospital was a rocket launch gone wrong.
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Post by Admin on Oct 19, 2023 13:35:35 GMT
President Biden's visit to Israel was an explicit show of support for Israel. It came as both Israeli and U.S. inteliigence supports the claim that Israel is not behind the deadly Gaza hospital strike Tuesday. CBS News' Holly Williams reports.
Each weekday morning, "CBS Mornings” co-hosts Gayle King, Tony Dokoupil and Nate Burleson bring you the latest breaking news, smart conversation and in-depth feature reporting. "CBS Mornings" airs weekdays at 7 a.m. on CBS and stream it at 8 a.m. ET on the CBS News app.
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Post by Admin on Oct 21, 2023 7:25:37 GMT
France’s military intelligence agency has concluded that a misfiring Palestinian rocket was the likely cause of the deadly explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, as Israel and Palestinian officials trade blame over the blast. The Directorate of Military Intelligence (DRM) said on Friday that an errant Palestinian rocket with an explosive charge of about 5kg was the likely cause of the blast and none of its intelligence pointed to an Israeli missile strike. In a briefing to multiple news agencies, a senior French military official said the size of the explosion was consistent with rockets used by Palestinians and the impact crater was too small to have been caused by an Israeli missile. The DRM did not offer an estimated death toll but said it was likely lower than the 471 fatalities reported by Palestinian officials, the news agencies reported. The assessment was based on classified information, satellite imagery, intelligence shared by other countries and open-source information, including images showing light structural damage at the hospital and relatively few civilian belongings at the blast site. French President Emmanuel Macron directed the DRM, which does not typically make its work public, to share its findings amid conflicting accounts of who carried out the attack. The French intelligence assessment adds to a flurry of claims and counterclaims about the hospital blast, which has sparked protests across the Middle East. Palestinian officials have blamed the explosion on an Israeli airstrike, while Israel has said it was caused by a rocket fired by the armed group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has denied responsibility. An investigation by Al Jazeera, based on video footage, has cast doubt on Israeli statements that a flash captured in a live news broadcast was caused by a misfiring rocket that hit the hospital. The United States’s National Security Council said earlier this week that its “current assessment” was that Israel was not responsible for the explosion.
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