*As Israel blames Islamic Jihad blast that killed nearly 500
*Islamic Jihad says ‘accusations promoted by the enemy are baseless’
*Says Israel ‘trying hard to evade responsibility for the brutal massacre it committed’
*As British intelligence services say analysing evidence to independently establish facts about deadly blast
With Agencies
Updates from Gaza Strip Wednesday revealed that Official Digital Spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hanania Naftali, had Tuesday evening, acknowledged in a tweet on his account on the “X” platform, that Israeli forces had attacked Gaza hospital because they believed it was harboring a base for Hamas militants.
The Prime Minister’s spokesman, however, quickly deleted tweet later and replaced it with a clarification, in which he claimed that an error had occurred, as he wrote with justification that what he said earlier was based on a report by Reuters News Agency that falsely claimed that Israel had bombed the hospital, the Prime Minister’s spokesman said according to Arab News reports on Wednesday.
In the meantime, the Israeli military, Wednesday morning, denied involvement in the explosion that killed over 500 people and wounded over 300 at the Gaza City hospital and that the blast was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket without explaining how the Palestinian rocket was misfired.
Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, had blamed the blast on Israel but Israel said the bomb blast occurred as a result of a failed rocket launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group in the enclave.
The Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry said Wednesday that 500 people were killed and more than 300 others wounded by the strike on the Gaza hospital, which happened on Tuesday.
“The death toll of the largest and most violent massacre committed by the criminal Israeli occupation inside the Baptist Hospital reached 471 martyrs, and 28 critical cases remain, in addition to 314 people with various injuries,” the ministry said in a statement.
In an English-language briefing, Israeli military chief spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said an investigation had “confirmed that there was no IDF (Israel Defense Forces) fire from the land, sea or air that hit the hospital.”
He said there was no structural damage to buildings around the Al-Ahli Al-Arabi hospital and no craters consistent with an air strike.
“The evidence – which we are sharing with you all – confirms that the explosion at the hospital in Gaza was caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket that misfired,” Hagari said.
“Our radar system tracked missiles fired by terrorists in Gaza at the time of the explosion and the trajectory analysis of the rockets shows the rockets were fired in close proximity to the hospital.”
Asked to explain the size of the explosion at the site, Hagari said it was consistent with unspent rocket fuel catching fire. “Most of this damage would have been done due to the propellant, not just the warhead,” he said.
Hagari also accused Hamas of inflating the number of casualties from the explosion and said it could not know as quickly as it claimed what had caused the blast.
The death toll from the hospital explosion, Arab News report says, was by far the highest of any single incident in Gaza during the current violence, triggering protests in the occupied West Bank and in the wider region, including in Jordan and Turkiye.
There have been comments about Israeli authorities tactics of striking and denying especially cooking up stories to deny exact oppressive operations that it evidently carried out with impunity against women and children of Palestine.
Its Wednesday’s account of the Gaza hospital attack, therefore, have pushed many requiring more to be said to be convinced as the Israeli military chief spokesman, Hagari, said some 450 rockets fired from Gaza had fallen short and landed inside the Strip within the last 11 days.
The account have been described as an attempt by Israel to also deny that all the bombadments leading to killing of about 2,000 civilians in Gaza and reported by reputable global television networks since before during and since October 7 are also not by it.
“We have intelligence about communication between terrorists talking about rockets misfiring,” Hagari said, without elaborating.
However, Islamic Jihad had denied Israel’s claim that it was behind the deadly blast at Al-Ahli hospital, even as it accused Israel of “trying hard to evade responsibility for the brutal massacre it committed.”
“The accusations promoted by the enemy are baseless,” Islamic Jihad said, adding that the group “does not use places of worship or public facilities, especially hospitals, as military centers or weapons stores.”
The group said details such as “the angle of the bomb’s fall and the extent of destruction it left behind” confirm it was similar to Israeli strikes.
Islamic Jihad is a smaller, more radical Palestinian militant group that often cooperates with Hamas in their shared struggle against Israel.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to offer condolences over a deadly blast at a Gaza hospital and voice support for Palestinians’ “legitimate aspirations,” the State Department said Wednesday.
Blinken, who was in Amman on a regional tour, spoke late Tuesday by telephone with Abbas “to express profound condolences for the civilian lives lost in the explosion” at the Gaza hospital, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.
British intelligence services are analyzing evidence to independently establish the facts about Tuesday’s deadly blast at a Gaza hospital, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday.
“We should not rush to judgments before we have all the facts,” Sunak told lawmakers.
“Our intelligence services have been rapidly analyzing the evidence to independently establish the facts. We are not in a position at this point to say more than that.”
