U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday that authorities believed the video showed a Palestinian rocket fired from Gaza suffering “catastrophic engine failure” before part of the rocket crashed into the hospital grounds. A senior intelligence official said authorities could not rule out the possibility that new information would come to light that would change their assessment, but said they had high confidence in their conclusions.
Asked about the Times’ findings, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the Times and the American intelligence community had interpreted the video differently.
It’s particularly difficult to figure out what happened because Israel and Hamas have been shooting at each other since the war began.
According to video evidence and the hospital’s official Facebook page, Israel fired more than 8,000 munitions into Gaza in a brutal attack and even hit Al-Ahli Arab Hospital with a flare artillery shell three days earlier.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad have continued to attack Israel with deadly rockets from hidden launch points in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian rockets have malfunctioned in the past, and one estimate suggests that 15 percent of rockets fired by militant groups in the Gaza Strip fail.
Within an hour of the hospital explosion, an information war began. Hamas immediately blamed an Israeli airstrike, while the Israel Defense Forces soon denied any responsibility and blamed a defective Palestinian rocket.
Israeli officials released a report on the explosion on October 18 and also released a conversation they said had been wiretapped between Hamas militants who blamed Islamic Jihad for the blast. Israel has also cited several other pieces of evidence that have not been made public, including logs of military activities, information from radar systems, other recorded audio and other videos.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials have highlighted the Al Jazeera video in media interviews and on social media.
Al Jazeera’s video footage was divided three just from the Israel Defense Forces on X, formerly known as Twitter. In the posts, the Israeli military identified the moving aerial object as a “missile aimed at Israel” that “misfired and exploded” almost simultaneously with the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. Israeli military spokesmen also specifically identified this munition as the misfired rocket that caused the explosion in interviews with CNN and the BBC on October 18 and in an interview with India Today on October 19.
Numerous media outlets have shown the video footage and several have cited it as evidence that a Palestinian rocket hit the hospital.
But The Times concluded that the missile in the video was never near the hospital. It was launched from Israel, not Gaza, and appears to have exploded over the Israel-Gaza border, at least three kilometers from the hospital.