A tabulated survey of nongovernment analyses of the Ahli Arab Hospital explosion and the bases relied upon, sortable by source, date of publication, name (or description) of analyst, and whether Al Jazeera video was relied upon
J Andres Gannon, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, in the US, says the ground explosions appeared to be small, meaning that the heat generated from the impact may have been caused by leftover rocket fuel rather than an explosion from a warhead. Mr Gannon says it is not possible to determine whether the projectile struck its intended target from the footage he has seen. He adds that the flashes in the sky likely indicate the projectile was a rocket with an engine that overheated and stopped working.
Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute, agrees. While it is difficult to be sure at such an early stage, he says, the evidence looks like the explosion was caused by a failed rocket section hitting the car park and causing a fuel and propellant fire.
Valeria Scuto, lead Middle East analyst at Sibylline, a risk assessment company, notes that Israel has the capacity to carry out other forms of air strike by drone, where they might use Hellfire missiles. These missiles generate a significant amount of heat but would not necessarily leave a large crater. But she says uncorroborated footage shows a pattern of fires at the hospital site that was not consistent with this explanation.
Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon chief of high value targeting during the Iraq war in 2003, told the Guardian: “The number [of casualties] is astronomically high, an absolute high range of all time if true. “The crater is not consistent with an airstrike, it is more likely to be a weapon that failed and released its payload over a wide area. “The crater and surrounding damage is also not consistent with a JDAM aerial bomb. The hole on the ground occurred from kinetic energy.”
Justin Bronk, the senior research fellow for airpower and military technology at RUSI in London, said that while the results were not conclusive, no crater or obvious shrapnel pattern consistent with standard JDAM bombs was visible in images of the aftermath. “If this is the extent of the damage then I’d say an airstrike looks less likely than a rocket failure causing an explosion and fuel fire,” he added.
“In the absence of additional evidence, the most likely scenario would be that it was a rocket launched from Gaza that failed mid-flight and that it mistakenly hit the hospital,” said Henry Schlottman, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and open-source intelligence expert. Intelligence analyst Schlottman said the most likely scenario remains that it was a militant rocket that somehow had some kind of malfunction mid-flight and then landed on the hospital. “We have video of when the explosion happened and the only rocket visible in that video was the one that kind of had that diverging trajectory,” he said. “We cannot possibly exclude other scenarios. ... Just what we have right now points to that.”
Andrea Richardson, an expert in analyzing open-source intelligence who is a consultant with the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, said specific landmarks visible in the videos show where the rockets were launched. “From the video evidence that I have seen, it’s very clear that the rockets came from within Gaza,” said Richardson, a human rights lawyer and experienced war crimes investigator who has worked in the Middle East. She added that the timing of the rocket launches, the explosion and the first reports that the hospital had been hit also seemed to confirm the sequence of events. Richardson said the timestamps on videos showing the rocket launches from within Gaza, the midair malfunction and the large explosion striking the hospital below within seconds of each other provided a logical chain of events. “An incredibly small timeframe,” she said.
Justin Crump, a former British Army officer and intelligence consultant, said the failure rate of such homemade rockets is high. “You can see obviously it fails in flight, it spins out and disintegrates, and the impacts on the ground follow that,” said Crump, CEO of Sibylline, a London-based strategic advisory firm. “The most likely explanation is this was a tragic accident.”
David Shank, a retired U.S. Army colonel and expert on military rockets and missiles, said the large fireball captured on video at the hospital could potentially be explained by the fact the malfunctioning militant rocket impacted prematurely and was still full of propellant. That highly volatile fuel then ignited when it hit the ground, setting off a large explosion but leaving a relatively small crater. Added missile expert Shank [regarding the Iron Dome hypothesis]: “They don’t engage a target unless it’s going to impact a critical asset such as a population area, maybe a power grid, maybe a military base.” “It’s technically designed to take the best shot that gives it the highest probability of kill,” he said. “And for Iron Dome ... that is not over Gaza.”
John Erath, the senior policy director at the Center for Arms Control and an expert on missile defense, said that while it might be technically possible for Iron Dome to intercept a missile over Gaza, it would be unlikely in this case because the projectile was very early in its flight path – still on the way up – and the system is designed to only intercept projectiles it determines are on a flight path to a populated part of Israel. “I’m not saying that it’s impossible,” Erath said. “But based on my understanding of how the system works, it is unlikely.”
The WSJ video analysis is based on four vantage points, including the Al Jazeera video. The analysis is largely premised on the assumption that the Al Jazeera video depicts a misfired rocket, and not an Iron Dome interception. But there is also some analysis from scene images: Explosives experts who reviewed the blast footage and photos of the aftermath see further evidence that the failed rocket was the caused of the explosion on the ground. This craters shows an impact pattern coming from the east, in line with the rocket's path. The shallowness of the crater is also consistent with impact from a failed rocket. Experts say the cars closest to the impact crater were likely hit with fragments from the rocket, causing one to explode and burning several others. These marks next to the crater and damage to the buildings show that the fragments from the impact flew across the grassy areas were sheltering. (at 3:05-3:41).
“One would expect remnants to be recoverable in all but the most extreme circumstances, and the available imagery of the hospital site suggests something ought to be identifiable on the ground,” said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services, a consultancy based in Australia.
Markus Schiller, a Munich-based rocket and missile expert, said he estimated that it would have taken one of the standard Qassam-model rockets used by Palestinian armed groups between 25 and 45 seconds to reach the hospital from the launch site, depending on factors including launch angle. [Relevant to this part of WaPo's analysis: "The barrage seen in the videos, which included more than a dozen visible rockets, begins 44 seconds before the hospital explosion and lasts for 14 seconds, meaning many or potentially all of the rockets could have reached the hospital in time for the explosion. There was no visual evidence to prove that any of them failed and crashed."]
Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and scientist-in-residence at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said that his findings conformed with Schiller’s and that the rockets would have taken between roughly 26 and 37 seconds to reach the hospital. [Relevant to this part of WaPo's analysis: "The barrage seen in the videos, which included more than a dozen visible rockets, begins 44 seconds before the hospital explosion and lasts for 14 seconds, meaning many or potentially all of the rockets could have reached the hospital in time for the explosion. There was no visual evidence to prove that any of them failed and crashed."]
The Post sent that video and another that captured the moment of the explosion to multiple audio forensic experts for review. Rob Maher, a professor at Montana State University, said that the increasing frequency produced by the incoming projectile indicates that it was accelerating. Acceleration could imply that the projectile was falling vertically, gaining speed from gravity, he said, adding that that would be more consistent with a malfunctioning rocket plummeting from the sky, according to acoustic analysis, than an object moving horizontally.
Marc Garlasco, a former Defense Department battle damage assessment analyst and U.N. war crimes investigator, said the blast required a “substantial” amount of explosive payload and fuel accelerant, like that carried by a malfunctioning rocket. “I can categorically say this wasn’t an airstrike,” Garlasco said. Garlasco noted the large amount of what he called "localized thermal damage,” meaning destruction from fire, which he said is not common in airstrikes. Such a scene, he said, is instead more consistent with a munition “with a lot of fuel in it” falling to the ground prematurely and igniting along with its warhead. That would create a flash fire that ignited the compound with concentrated rather than widespread damage, Garlasco said.
The size of the crater and the blast bore some similarities to an impact from a 155-millimeter artillery round, a munition in the Israeli arsenal, said Chris Cobb-Smith, a security consultant and former artillery officer in the British army. But other weapons could do the same, and an artillery round would not have produced the fireball seen in the blast videos, he said.
Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at the U.K.-based defense and security think tank Royal United Services Institute, interpreted the footage differently and wrote in an email that it captured “a single visible rocket motor that shows a sudden, quite violent course change that would be consistent with a control surface failure, followed by a shower of sparks consistent with a structural breakup in flight a few seconds later." [Relevant to part of WaPo analysis concluding that the Al Jazeera video shows an Iron Dome intercept missile snaking through the sky as it calibrates the trajectory of the missile to be intercepted].
Former UN war crimes investigator Marc Garlasco tweeted: "In 20 years of investigating war crimes this is the first time I haven't seen any weapon remnants. And I've worked three wars in Gaza." . . . Mr Garlasco said he believed the [Al Jazeera] footage was consistent with an Iron Dome interception.
The Forensic Architecture agency, a UK-based organisation which investigates human rights abuses, hascarried outits own analysis of the crater, and suggests it is more consistent with the impact marks from an artillery shell which it concludes came from the direction of Israel.
NR Jenzen-Jones, a director at Armament Research Services, says the crater is significantly smaller than one typically generated by a 155mm artillery projectile.
But Mark Cancian of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies said that, based on evidence so far, it was difficult to differentiate whether it was caused by an artillery shell, a mortar or a rocket - it could potentially be any of them.
"About one second before the explosion there appears a 'comet trail' of burning particles behind the rocket - probably pieces of disintegrating propellant grain. After the explosion there is an elongated glowing debris cloud that fades out after a couple of seconds. This is not typical to Tamir [Iron Dome] interception, where the Tamir's warhead explodes causing an almost immediate sympathetic explosion of the hostile rocket warhead," says Dr Uzi Rubin, an Israeli defence analyst at Rusi, who was the founder and first director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization.
In contrast, the UK’s Channel 4 reported on Friday that an analysis by UK-based Forensic Architecture and others cast doubt on the rocket’s origin [Embedded tweet by FA]: In reviewing our analysis, investigator & explosive weapons expert @CobbSmith agrees the fragmentation patterns may indicate the projectile came from the northeast—the direction of the Israeli-controlled side of the Gaza perimeter—and not from the west, as claimed by the IOF.
That video shows a series of rocket launches from Gaza. That video clearly shows how the Iron Dome intercepted these rockets. Going back to the Al Jazeera live feed at 18:59:35, we can see a single rocket launched from Gaza. This is the rocket in question. This rocket can also be seen on the Israeli video. 15 seconds later, Al Jazeera's live feed shows that the same rocket was intercepted at exactly 18:59:50. This interception has the same afterglow seen in previous interceptions. A closer look at the video captured by the Al Jazeera live feed shows the rocket being completely destroyed and broken apart in the sky. According to all feeds and videos analyzed, this rocket was intercepted and was the last one launched from Gaza before the bombing of the hospital. 5 seconds after that interception, an explosion in Gaza can be seen, followed 2 seconds later by a much larger explosion. This is the strike that hit al-Ahli Arab Hospital. As a result, Al Jazeera digital investigations team found no grounds to the Israeli army claim that the strike on the al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza was caused by a failed rocket launch.
According to several experts, including U.S. military advisor Marc Garlasco, an expert in the investigation of war crimes, what hit the floor of the parking lot did not come from an airstrike. “Even the smallest JDAM [guided missile] causes a 3m [10-foot] crater,” Garlascotweeted.
Finally, the forensic analysis of the crater through graphic material has allowed one of the best projects of verification through open sources, the London-based Forensic Architecture — which has done brilliant work in the region, such as the reconstruction of the death of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin by Israeli fire — to trace the possible direction from which the projectile arrived at the parking lot of the Gaza hospital. According to its analysis and three-dimensional projection, what hit the Al Ahli center came from the northeastern area, not from the southwest, as the Israeli army explained through its statements in the first hours after the massacre. [Embedding FA tweet :] 3D analysis shows patterns of radial fragmentation on the southwest side of the impact crater, as well as a shallow channel leading into the crater from the northeast. Such patterns indicate a likely projectile trajectory with northeast origins.
The footage has become a widely cited piece of evidence as Israeli and American officials have made the case that an errant Palestinian rocket malfunctioned in the sky, fell to the ground and caused a deadly explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. But a detailed visual analysis by The New York Times concludes that the video clip — taken from an Al Jazeera television camera livestreaming on the night of Oct. 17 — shows something else. The missile seen in the video is most likely not what caused the explosion at the hospital. It actually detonated in the sky roughly two miles away, The Times found, and is an unrelated aspect of the fighting that unfolded over the Israeli-Gaza border that night. The Times’s finding does not answer what actually did cause the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital blast, or who is responsible. The contention by Israeli and American intelligence agencies that a failed Palestinian rocket launch is to blame remains plausible. But the Times analysis does cast doubt on one of the most publicized pieces of evidence that Israeli officials have used to make their case and complicates the straightforward narrative they have put forth.
This lined up with the conclusions of a so-called “Doppler Effect analysis” by the Earshot audio investigation group, which looked at sound waves related to distance, and found that the missile likely approached from the northeast, east, or southeast, but not from the west as Israel’s military has claimed.
“We have none of the indicators of an airstrike—none,” said Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an expert on military and security issues. Knights said the scene showed it “very clearly was hit by a rolling fireball.” The most plausible cause for that, Knights said, is rocket fuel, consistent with the Israeli military’s explanation that a rocket misfired.
“At the moment, the preponderance of evidence does point to it being a Hamas or PIJ rocket hitting the area,” said Blake Spendley, an open-source intelligence analyst. He said videos and photos he has reviewed showing the scene were more consistent with a death toll of about 50 rather than the 500 initially claimed by Hamas. Spendley said that kind of damage appeared more consistent with a fireball from a rocket rather than the kinds of weapons that Israel’s air force uses, such as Joint Direct Action Munition, or JDAM, guided bombs. “Something like a short-range rocket will cause more fire,” he said. “With something like a JDAM you will get a lot of blast energy, and not as much energy wasted in heat or fire or light. There were some characteristics with the Palestinians killed in the strike that have led me to believe that there was a lot more fire that came from the impact than just pure blast energy.” A definitive conclusion, Spendley said, would require postmortem analysis of victims and other forensic field work that is unlikely to occur given Gaza’s current conditions.
Nathan Ruser, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the scene shown in photos was “not consistent with an airstrike and are not consistent with claims that 500+ people were killed.”
The published images also show a lack of shrapnel patterns associated with Israeli air force bombs, said Justin Bronk, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London.
“Still not conclusive, but IF this is the extent of the damage then I’d say an airstrike looks less likely than a rocket failure causing an explosion and fuel fire,” Bronk wrote on X.
GeoConfirmed, which is run by volunteers, said the strike was likely to have been caused by “a missile launched by a Palestinian group [which] exploded mid-air (reason unknown) and one piece fell on the hospital causing an explosion”. The group cited several clips believed to be of the explosion from different sources and claimed the “geolocation and timing of the footage is conclusive”. However, they said their conclusions were not “proven fact”. “That doesn’t mean that they are THE truth, just what we think is highly likely based on our geolocations (facts) and logic/reason,” GeoConfirmed wrote on Twitter. “We are geolocators, not official investigators… To be sure what really happened, different official investigations are needed.”
Separately, Evan Hill, who conducts open source investigations for the Washington Post, said a video taken from a livestream “does appear to show a rocket interception” followed by an explosion at the hospital.
Footage of what appears to be an explosion at the hospital emerged from Al Jazeera Mubasher later on in the evening. A second video from an Al Jazeera live feed showed the same incident.That was geolocated, which involves comparing the background in the video with satellite images to corroborate the location, by GeoConfirmed, an outfit that works alongside the Centre for Information Resilience and Bellingcat. The location was around the Al-Ahli Arabi Baptist Hospital in Gaza City. The exact location of the fire was zeroed down to the southeast side of Palestine Square. It was also timestamped by the live feed.
Both that and another Al Jazeera live feed showed a rocket being fired in the air and appearing to break up into two pieces, after which it hit what the geolocators believe is the Ahli Arab hospital. A statement from GeoConfirmed read: “The above footage is showing a rocket fail and breaking up in two pieces, one falling on the hospital.”
Another analysis [linking to Oliver Alexander on Twitter] suggests that the explosion looks to have been caused by “a rocket motor failure”, adding that a “plum” can be seen coming off the rocket before the explosion. They wrote: “After the rocket motor failure, the rocket disintegrates. One part lands first causing a small blast, likely part of the motor. The warhead then lands on the hospital causing the larger blast.”
Other videos, on the other hand, seem authentic. For example, live footage from Al Jazeera showing a bright light rising into the sky over Gaza on Tuesday evening. Another video that is widely shared shows how a rocket apparently breaks into two parts shortly after its launch, followed by an explosion in the air and one on the ground. Fire breaks out. The skyline, which can be seen vaguely at night, matches the area around the hospital. Weapons expert Fabian Hoffmann from the University of Oslo also believes that the most likely explanation is that a crashed rocket hit the hospital. "It seems as if the rocket was destroyed in several phases," Hoffmann wrote to SPIEGEL in an email. In some pictures it looks as if the rocket had been fired. According to Hoffmann, however, there are two arguments against it: If the rocket had been intercepted, a single, sudden explosion would have been seen. The Israeli defense system blocks projectiles during the descent. “Iron Dome is not designed to intercept rockets as they rise,” writes Hoffmann. It is difficult to say exactly what led to the crash. There could be a problem with the rocket motor. "The rocket's fuel probably ignited so much that the rocket was destroyed," says Hoffmann. (Google Translate from German)
PBS:For more on this, we turn to Marc Garlasco, the military adviser at PAX Protection of Civilians and a former Defense Department analyst with decades of experience in targeting and assessing bomb damage. Marc Garlasco, thanks very much. Welcome back to the "NewsHour." Let's start with this photo that we're going to show right now. You have visited countless, countless scenes of bomb aftermath. What do you see in this photo?MG:Well, if you take a look at the physical evidence that we see here in the photo, I mean, one thing it says to me is, this was not an airstrike, right? You don't have a three-to-nine-meter — that's about a 10-to-30-foot — crater that I would normally expect from an Israeli JDAM, which is a Joint Direct Attack Munition, a GPS-guided bomb, which is typical for what the Israelis would use here. You also see a lot of surface damage and fire damage and very little damage to any of the buildings. And these are some of the telltale signs that I would be looking for an airstrike, particularly from the types of weapons that Israel employs.PBS:And you mentioned fire damage. Let me show another photo, the aftermath of the strike, especially these burned cars. Why is that significant?MG:Sure. Well, when military weapons go off, they don't tend to have a long-term thermal effect. You don't want to waste a lot of energy with fire. And so they're trying to create a very rapid blast and fragmentation. But as we saw in the video that you put up earlier, and as you can see here, there was a very high-temperature fire that lasted for quite a while. That's not the kind of thing that we would see from the type of military munitions that Israel would use. And, also, when you look at those cars, you don't see the fragmentation that you would find from a typical weapon that they would be using in an airstrike. . . . PBS:But it sounds like, in terms of today, you're confident in saying that this does not appear to be an Israeli airstrike?MG:No, I don't think we have seen an Israeli airstrike here. When you look at Israel's response to this and them saying that this was likely a Palestinian rocket that had been fired and failed, I think that that is certainly a plausible response, the idea being that, as that rocket was launching, it still had a substantial amount of fuel. And when it tumbled from the sky, that crater that we saw, which is actually more like just a small hole in the ground, that was created by the kinetic energy of something hitting, and then there was an awful lot of accelerant, right, fuel mixed with explosives spreading throughout that hospital. Unfortunately, you had Palestinian civilians jammed into that tiny area because they were trying to seek safety from this conflict. And we have to ensure that this does not happen again.
Fabian Hoffman, a defence and missile technology expert from the University of Oslo, said a “Hamas rocket experiencing some type of systematic error causing it to fall on the hospital” was the “most plausible explanation so far”. Mr Hoffmann suggested the rocket’s warhead may not have detonated in the car park of the hospital, suggesting it was shrapnel and rocket fuel that caused the blast.
Justin Bronk, a leading air power expert at the Rusi think tank, said the object sounded under-powered in video footage posted online. He also believes that the explosion on the ground appeared to be a fireball, likely caused by part of the rocket holding the fuel exploding on impact. “Incoming projectile sounds like it’s under power[ed] and the explosion frames visible look like largely propellant fire rather than high explosive detonation,” Mr Bronk wrote on Twitter.
“This is the most noticeable damage to the ground, which, if it were the impact point of the munition used, would mean it’s pretty small payload,” Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, the leading open source investigation agency.
"The explosion has a lot of flame and propagates relatively slowly. You would expect to see much more rapid propagation, a stronger blast wave and much less flame from a military-grade explosive," Justin Bronk, a senior military analyst at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) told Sky News. Mr Bronk says the amount of fire and how quickly it spreads in the video suggests that it was caused by propellant or fuel rather than an explosion from a bomb. He also noted that the sound of the explosion captured in the video doesn't match up with what you'd expect from a military-grade explosive. "High explosives detonate incredibly quickly, whereas low-grade explosives, like propellants, burn a lot slower," he said. . . . Justin Bronk echoes this claim [regarding the crater being small compared to what is usually seen with Israeli airstrikes and extent of damage from other airstrikes not adding up] and outlines that one would expect far more extensive damage at the site if the kind of weaponry Israel's Air Force has been using in Gaza was used in this incident. "There would be an enormous crater and the cars in the impact zone would either be gone or be in tiny pieces all over the surrounding area. You would see much more damage to the surrounding buildings," he told Sky News. There has been some speculation that the small crater can be explained by the use of a surface or airburst bomb - warheads that are designed to impact wider areas, rather than deep in the ground. However, the nature of damage to the cars and buildings in the hospital complex suggests this is unlikely, says Mr Bronk. "If it was a standard JDAM bomb, the lethal radius could be hundreds of metres wide. And if it was some sort of smaller missile, you'd still expect to see a lot more damage to the cars."
"There are a lot of burned-out cars, but there is structural damage to only three of them," said Rebecca Shrimpton, defence director at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. "As well as that, the crater is certainly small compared to what you usually see with Israeli airstrikes. It just doesn't add up when you compare it to damage from other strikes in Gaza."
Xavier Tytleman, an aeronautics consultant and editor of Air & Cosmos, said the rocket was likely an Iranian-designed BADR-3 which is used by Palestinian militants. "What is possible is that the first stage detached at the wrong moment, which would orient the missile on a different trajectory." He added: "The visible crater was not very big. Even if it was a mistake and they had targeted that place by mistake, there is no Israeli bomb that does that."
Héloïse Fayet, researcher at the French Institute of International Relations, said: "For the moment, it is difficult to make the link between the strong explosion on the ground (visible on the Al Jazeera video) and the slight damage observed at the hospital…The most likely hypothesis is the fall of a projectile on the cars and an explosion in the gas tanks of several of these cars."
Joseph Henrotin, editor in chief of the French military journal Défense et sécurité internationale, also expressed reservations about the Israeli attack claim, saying: "If you target a building with the ammunition available to the Israelis, normally you hit that building."
CNN revisited the footage broadcast live by Al Jazeera on the night of the explosion to better understand what has been considered a key piece of evidence. While the new analysis adds to the evolving picture of what happened, it does not alter CNN’s earlier findings that the blast was likely caused by a malfunctioning rocket, not an Israeli airstrike. . . . Weapons and explosive experts with decades of experience assessing bomb damage, who reviewed the visual evidence, told CNN they believe this to be the most likely scenario – although they caution the absence of munition remnants or shrapnel from the scene made it difficult to be sure. All agreed that the available images of evidence of the damage at the site was not consistent with an Israeli airstrike. Still, no visual evidence has surfaced showing a rocket hitting the hospital, and CNN cannot exclude other possibilities. Without the ability to access the scene and gather evidence from the ground, no conclusion can be definitive.
Markus Schiller, a Germany-based missile expert who has worked on analysis for NATO and the European Union, told CNN that the projectile pictured in the Al Jazeera footage “matched the profile” of a Tamir interceptor missile launched by Israel’s Iron Dome, based on its rapid change in course, followed by the mid-air explosion seconds later. “Tamir interceptors are only launched if the fully automated integrated air and missile defense system calculates a direct threat to certain areas, as to avoid intercepting missiles that hit fields, or sparsely inhabited areas,” said Schiller. “It is well possible that only a single interceptor was launched to intercept one of the missiles that went off course.” . . . Schiller said that he estimated a Qassam rocket, which are used by Palestinian militants, would have taken about 25 to 40 seconds to reach the distance from the launch site to the hospital, depending on variables like launch angle, acceleration and burn time. He added that the most likely cause of the explosion was a rocket launched towards Israel “that fell short and hit the hospital’s parking lot” just a few seconds after what he described as the “intercept” seen in the Al Jazeera footage.
Photos and videos posted online were analysed by India Today’s OSINT team to help understand possible scenarios that could have unfolded. There appear to be more visual clues suggesting that the massacre was likely an accident/rocket failure than a targeted bombing from the skies. By comparing the pictures of the aftermath of the missile strike at the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital, it becomes evident that the vicinity of the parking lot and surrounding areas were the closest to the explosion. Social media videos show extensive damage to the cars parked in the open space, and some damage to the walls of the hospital but don’t show the impact consistent with the Israeli air strikes since October 7. ... Further, to corroborate our findings, we revisited the appearance of previous sites that had been subjected to Israeli rocket strikes in Gaza. The high-resolution satellite images captured by Maxar technologies a week before showed the Wanton tower in Gaza in ruins after a retaliatory aerial strike by Israel, leaving extensive damage to the building. However, from the images and videos of the hospital surfacing online, there seem to be no visible signs of a large crater in the parking lot or any substantial damage to the buildings close by. These signs make the “Aerial Bombing” theory less plausible.
An analysis by Bellingcat, an independent investigative nongovernmental organization, also found that the hospital itself wasn’t hit, but rather the adjacent parking lot. “The only location damaged is outside the hospital in the parking lot where we can see signs of burning, no cratering and no structural damage to nearby buildings,” Bellingcat director of research and training Giancarlo Fiorella said Wednesday, adding that the distance between the crater area and where people were was about 20 to 30 feet.
Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a military-focused think tank in London, agreed. “Based on what I’ve seen so far, I really doubt that this was an airstrike,” he said, adding that the “blast damage seen so far doesn’t fit” with the missiles Israel has been using to strike Gaza over the past week and a half.
Retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander of NATO and an NBC News contributor, held a similar opinion. “To my eye, the damage on the ground does not look at all like what you would see from an airstrike or a precision-guided weapon,” he said. “It looks like a projectile with a lot of fuel in it hit a parking lot and created a fireball.”
Former British army Maj. Chris Cobb-Smith, a weapons and munitions expert, said the Israeli case was “pretty thorough and conclusive,” although he cautioned that he would “want to see remnants of the munition recovered from the rubble.” “As more evidence emerges, it appears it may well be an errant Palestinian rocket,” he said. “We should not be blinkered that this may, indeed, be an error on the part of the Palestinian forces.”
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Stephen Twitty, a former deputy commander of U.S. European Command and an NBC News military analyst, said the trajectory from the Al Jazeera video showed it had been fired from the ground, rather than the air, but he stopped short of any further conclusions.
"The explosion itself offers some evidence," said ABC News contributor Steve Ganyard, a former State Department official and Marine Corps fighter pilot. "What we see is a big fireball. That's what you usually see out of a rocket or something where the residual fuel is still burning, not from high-explosive ordnance." An Israeli air or artillery strike would be more likely to result in a visual plume of dust and dirt rather than a fireball, he said. After reviewing nighttime video of the explosion, Ganyard said, "What's unique about this video is not the visuals. It's the sound because what we hear is the sound of the high speed rocket. This is not the sound of ordinance that's dropped from an airplane. This is not the sound of an air strike. It's something moving very very fast." . . . "The burned out cars are also evidence. If it were a high-explosive airstrike, it would create a giant crater and those cars would be blown out of the square. But what we're seeing is burned out cars, and we're seeing a puncture mark which suggests a rocket and residual fuel causing a fire that burned those cars out but did not destroy them," he said.
"From the video released publicly, the explosion is consistent with a rocket that still had a lot of rocket fuel at the time of impact," said Mick Mulroy, an ABC News national security analyst who previously served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, a CIA officer, and a U.S. Marine.
Drone footage of the aftermath does not appear to show a large crater, which would be expected with a surface-detonated Israeli bomb or missile, according to Eric Oehlerich, an ABC News contributor and retired Navy SEAL. Nor does the footage seem to show pock marks on the hospital walls from fragmentation, as would be expected from an Israeli air-burst weapon, he said. "The main post-explosion signature is that of fire, all of the cars are burned," Oehlerich said. "This is consistent with a rocket full of fuel that has been knocked out of a straight-line trajectory."
Channel 4:Earshot investigators have analyzed two aspects of the blast which killed so many at the Christian Hospital. First, Doppler effect sound analysis of the missile tracking to the hospital that night.Lawrence Abu Hamdan:It's the compression of sound waves as a moving object is emitting sound, and then as it's moving away, that frequency decreases, that pitch decreases.Channel 4:That analysis produced this mapping. The red line is where the Israelis said the missile was fired from by, they say, Islamic Jihad, from within southwestern Gaza, but this new Doppler sound mapping analysis concludes that the missile came from a variety of possible firing points: the blue arrows, all east of the hospital, not west, as the IDF claimed. That map arose from this Doppler mapping of the audio of the missile flying to impact at the hospital and the sound recorded by a geolocated eyewitness 150 meters southeast of the hospital.
Channel 4:We turn now to the image analysis carried out by Forensic Architecture at London University. They've conducted 3D resolution of the impact strike crater and shrapnel splash marks in the hospital car park. Those radial fragmentation marks open toward the southwest with a shallow channel leading to the crater from the northeast. Their conclusion matches the audio analysis of the missile track. They say whatever hit the hospital car park that night was fired from the northeast, and not from the southwest of Gaza, as the Israeli Defense Forces claim.Omar Ferwati - Researcher, Forensic Architecture:We also shared this with an independent weapons and explosives expert that corroborated our understanding of the likely direction as coming from the northeast.
Photos from the following day also appear to show little damage to the hospital buildings, and a relatively small blast zone from the explosion. That damage pattern is inconsistent with a large air-dropped bomb, which would leave a crater and create a shockwave that would damage or destroy surrounding structures, says Marc Garlasco, a former targeting officer for the U.S. military who now works for PAX, a Netherlands-based non-profit. "It's very clear to me that this is not an airstrike," Garlasco says. Israeli bombs typically leave craters three to ten meters in size, and are designed to create a large shockwave that propels shrapnel over a large area.
The lack of both shrapnel damage and structural damage to the hospital is inconsistent with all types of commonly used Israeli bombs and artillery shells, he says.
Methodology: This oldid was used. All 135 sources that appeared in the References section were examined. If one or more analyses of the cause of the explosion was found in the reference, it was added to the table. Analyses provided by governments were excluded. If the description of the analysis mentioned was such that it could be taken to have relied upon the AJ video, the "AJ Video?" column was filled accordingly; close calls, or instances where the analysis relied partially on the video, were resolved in favor of a "Y" in this column. Quotes from different places in the source but from the same analysts were merged, and line breaks were eliminated. Duplicates were omitted (for example, BBC Verify's later 2023-10-26 article quotes Garlasco's tweet about not having seen another case in 20 years where no munition remnants exist, and Le Monde quotes the same tweet on 2023-11-03, but only the former is included in the table. Likewise, the second BBC Verify piece (10-26) repeats the comments of Gannon and Bronk, but they are included in the table only once; but the second piece adds an additional quote from Gannon, which was inserted into the table as an additional row. Only analyses of the cause of the explosion were included; experts who analyzed other aspects of the incident (e.g., AFP's quoting a psychologist about the tendency to structure ambiguity according to one's preconceptions, Channel 4's independent Arab journalists questioning the accents of the supposed Palestinian militants in the purported call recording, and Earshot's conclusions about the purported call recording being stitched) were not included.
