Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital — Debunking the “misfired rocket” narrative
I considered approaching this essay with a chronological breakdown of the facts and the changing narrative, but taking our short attention spans and knee-jerk opinions into account it seems more prudent to dive straight into the primary evidence and sort out the context and the peripheral evidence at the end. I will begin by addressing the claims supporting Israel’s narrative before moving on to claims made by the Palestinians. I will take for granted that the reader is already aware of the bombing, regardless of who they think was responsible or how many people they think died in the incident.
The Israeli account of events — backed now by the US, France, Canada, and most of mainstream Western media — is that a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket struck the parking lot of the hospital. They present three crucial pieces of evidence and lines of reasoning to support this narrative (they claim to have much more, including satellite imagery, but they refuse to release anything):
1) They have an apparent recording of Hamas militants discussing the bombing and supposing that a Islamic Jihad rocket was responsible.
2)There is video of sustained rocket fire from the southwest of the hospital and passing over the hospital, with one rocket in particular which appears to explode over the hospital in the seconds before the fatal explosion in the parking lot. This rocket, they say, may have fallen into the parking lot and detonated there or triggered an explosion of ordinance stored there.
3)The crater from the explosion is too small to be from an Israeli missile, which leave craters several meters deep. The hospital is also still largely intact, while Israeli missiles are large enough to cause structural failures.
Let’s begin with the phone call, which has been presented as the “smoking gun.”
When it was first sent to me, I almost laughed. Before any analysis of the recording itself, it is obvious that such a phone call could easily be faked in short order by anyone who speaks Arabic, and it seems extraordinarily convenient that Israel, who supposedly had no intel of Hamas’s surprise attack, would be able to immediately record a phone call with their enemies intimately describing their own culpability in a massacre. Even if the recording was unedited and entirely credible in its dialogue, the nature of the evidence would be suspect without further corroborating information, but the opposite is true: the recording has been digitally edited and the dialogue has been described as “absurd.” These were the findings of UK’s Channel 4 news, which solicited the help of outside, independent investigators. A digital analysis team, Earshot NGO, found that the audio Israel presented was created with two independent voice recordings spliced together and altered with audio effects. Their assessment: “Though this audio analysis cannot categorically state that the audible dialogue is fake, we can say that the level of manipulation required to edit these two voices together disqualifies it as a source of credible evidence.”
Channel 4 also asked independent Arab journalists to assess the dialogue of the recording. They concluded that the video was a fake, telling correspondent Alex Thomson that “the tone, syntax, accent and idiom are absurd.”
Some readers will say that the editing of the audio is not conclusive proof of a fraud. The same readers will probably say that an “independent Arab journalist” will be inherently biased toward calling the dialogue unconvincing. In any case, the audio is far from smoking gun evidence. At best it is hearsay, just two uninformed people credulously repeating what they heard on the news or from circulating rumors. At worst (and in all probability) it is a complete fabrication.
Onto the video evidence. We have only a couple of videos that capture the moment of impact. In the first, a Gazan records from their balcony as a loud but unseen missile careens toward the hospital then explodes outside the hospital with an enormous ball of fire.
The other video, which Israel has held up as conclusive evidence of their narrative, is from an Al Jazeera live stream of the Gazan skyline, in which a rocket can be seen exploding in the air over the hospital a few seconds before the fatal explosion below.
The question, then, is could the exploded rocket in the live feed have been the same object which caused the missile sound and explosion in the closer video? And, if not, could it have been another, unseen PIJ rocket that was responsible? The answer to both questions is a resounding “no,” for a variety of reasons.
First, Palestinian rockets like the ones Israel points to in the Al Jazeera live stream are incapable of making the noise we hear in the close up video. Their design is such that they expend fuel to launch themselves into the air, then they coast on their momentum until striking a target. Because of this, they tend to be quiet in the second half of their flight. Add in the fact that the rocket in question had already been detonated in the air (or at least burst its fuel container), it would not have had any remaining jet propulsion with which to produce the howling sound we hear in the video. It also wouldn’t have had any fuel left over to burn up the cars in the parking lot, which various commentators have suggested were torched by rocket fuel. Even if the rocket had not burst in the air — even if a completely different rocket was responsible (and completely invisible on the live stream)— no Palestinian rocket would be capable of producing the sound heard in the video, which indicates something larger, jet-propelled, guided, and fired from above. Here is US Army veteran Dylan Griffith explaining the difference:
(Apologies for the lack of embedded video)
To further drive the point home, let’s compare the sound of the hospital strike to another Israeli airstrike, next to another hospital, only days later:
Nobody is claiming that the airstrike beside Al Quds hospital was a misfired rocket, yet the sound of the strike is almost identical to the strike which hit the Al-Ahli hospital. If you’re saying “they must have both been PIJ rockets!” then google any video of a JDAM missile strike. You’ll hear the same noise.
The video evidence already rules out the possibility of a Palestinian rocket and makes clear that an Israeli missile was responsible, but let’s do our due diligence and examine the rest of Israel’s claim. Their Hamas phone call refers to militants firing rockets from a neighboring cemetery, a block to the west. Nothing in the live stream indicates that any rockets came from the cemetery. If they had it would have to have fired straight into the hospital grounds to avoid appearing on the livestream, but the balcony video conclusively shows that the strike came from above and from much further away.
All the rockets which appear in the live stream came from a location to the southwest. In Israel’s media presentation, they confusingly point to this location in the south west and to the cemetery as the source of the fatal rocket. Obviously it can’t be both, but either possibility has been disproven by forensic analysis of the missile audio and of the site of the explosion.
Channel 4 news had an independent digital analysis team, Earshot NGO, review the audio of the balcony video. By analyzing the Doppler effect of the missile’s howling descent, they were able to determine that it came from the East of the hospital. The opposite direction of both possible sources claimed by the IDF.
A different independent team, Forensic Architecture, examined the crater. They identified the patterns of radial fragmentation surrounding the crater and noted a groove leading into the crater which indicates the direction from which the object struck the ground. The groove and the radial fragmentation indicate an approach from the north east. Again, the exact opposite direction that the rocket supposedly came from.
Ignoring the fact that the crater appears to have been caused by an object coming from the north east — the exact opposite direction of the rocket fire which supposedly caused the explosion — let’s focus on the claim that it could not have been an Israeli missile because it is too small of a crater or because the surrounding buildings did not collapse. This argument ignores the fact that Israel possesses a wide variety of munitions with different features and characteristics, suited to a given circumstance. If they want to bring a building to the ground or destroy underground tunnels, they have burrowing missiles which leave enormous craters, undermine building foundations, and often lead to structural collapse. These are only one part of the arsenal. The JDAM missile — the same type which is likely heard in videos of the bombing — has a “proximity fuse” setting, by which it can be programmed to explode either at impact or at any desired distance above the ground. If it exploded just before impact, it would leave a much smaller crater and cause far less damage to the hospital, while still having the power to kill swaths of people in the vicinity. It could also be equipped with a thermobaric warhead. This would result in a big fire ball, potentially engulf the surrounding cars as we see scorched in the aftermath photos, but cause less structural damage and cratering if detonated in an open area.
Now that the Israeli-US evidence has been addressed, let’s turn to the circumstantial evidence.
An Israeli propagandist celebrated the bombing in the minutes after it. Calling it a deliberate strike which succeeded in killing members of Hamas. He later deleted the tweet and said that he was going off of information he had seen published by Reuters.
The IDF and Israeli spokespersons then tweeted about a barrage of rockets passing over the vicinity of the hospital when it was hit. They accompanied the tweet with video evidence, which they subsequently deleted when it was revealed that the video was taken an hour after the incident. Here’s the original tweet:
Israel has consistently downplayed the number of casualties. In a report echoed by Israeli propaganda network i24news, they suggested that as few as 12 people may have died in the incident, despite the fact that videos taken in the immediate aftermath plainly reveal many dozens of bodies strewn in every direction and piled on top of each other. Even the US State Department estimated that between 150 and 250 civilians died in the explosion. Neither the journalist nor his sources could have possibly believed that only 12 people had died, which means that the report was a deliberate lie. Why intentionally downplay the number of casualties if you are certain that your enemy was responsible?
Finally, Israel’s bombing of the hospital was not unexpected. They threatened to bomb the hospital for days in advance of actually bombing it. They even fired warning shots on October 14th which struck the hospital and injured 4 people, just to make clear that they had every intention of bombing it. Bombing hospitals is not in any way out of the ordinary for them. During last weeks bombing campaign, they had already struck hospitals, clinics, and ambulances, killing at least 28 healthcare workers. Now they are threatening to bomb the Al-Quds hospital, where thousands of people are receiving treatment or seeking refuge.
When they bomb Al-Quds and commit another massacre, I wonder if they will repeat the same lie or invent a new one. Only time will tell.
But, but, but — US, Canadian, and French intelligence agencies all say that it couldn’t have been Israel! To that I say: of course they do. They are political tools, not unbiased sources of information. They’ll say whatever they want to support their ally and their agenda. Use your eyes, your ears, and your capacity for rational thought. Don’t be daft.
And for anyone that remains unconvinced: we shouldn’t even be discussing the hospital at this point. After 12,000 bombs dropped on civilian targets and thousands of children dead from Israeli bombs, the hospital massacre is a drop in the bucket of an ongoing genocide.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk, and Free Palestine.
