A rocket attack on a Gaza hospital has killed hundreds of people and has caused outrage and condemnation in much of the world. However, the perpetrator of the Al Ahli hospital massacre is not clear because since it occurred there have been an exchange of accusations between the parties involved in the conflict. Neither Israel nor the Islamist group Hamas nor the Islamic Jihad assume responsibility, but they do not present reliable evidence either.

The Israeli Army maintained this Tuesday that the explosion that caused, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the death of 500 Palestinians was due to a failed launch of rockets by militants of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) group towards Israel, while Hamas authorities blame Israeli forces for the attack.

The Islamist movement Hamas, which de facto controls the enclave, has accused the Israeli Army of carrying out a ““horrible massacre” that “left hundreds of victims in a crime of genocide“For its part, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), with limited power in the occupied West Bank, has also accused Israel of committing “a horrible crime in a genocidal war”, and its Prime Minister, Mohamed Shtayeh, has urged the Council Security Council to end the conflict, and has criticized “the countries that support Israel.”

Gaps in Israel’s evidence

Israel began by pointing the finger at Hamas for the attack, but then an Israeli Army spokesperson said that “multiple intelligence sources indicate that Islamic Jihad is responsible for the failed launch of the rocket that hit the hospital.” “An analysis of the Israeli Army’s operational systems indicates that terrorists fired a volley of rockets in Gaza that passed very close to the Al Ahli hospital at the time it suffered the impact“an Israeli military spokesman said in a statement.

To this end, they have contributed different videos that do not make it clear that this was the cause and, in addition, they have become entangled with the images on social networks since they published a video of an attack from August 2022 and another that had been recorded an hour after the attack.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, after the mess, also ended up blaming the “barbaric terrorists of Gaza” for the attack on Tuesday. “Let the whole world know: the barbaric terrorists of Gaza are the only ones who attacked the hospital in Gaza, not the Army,” the prime minister said in a statement.

In past war escalations, Palestinian militias launched rockets at Israel that fell inside Gaza, and according to Israel and local media, Islamic Jihad launched projectiles that even killed Palestinians in previous clashes, although there are no precedents for projectiles that would cause hundreds of deaths like this Tuesday. Until this incident, it was also unknown whether the Palestinian militias had an arsenal capable of causing this level of damage, in an explosion with such a level of deaths that it could seem more like a missile, something that neither Hamas nor Islamic Jihad have, in principle.

Israeli forces have bombed Gaza incessantly in the last eleven days, since the war with Israel broke out following the surprise attack by Hamas on October 7 that left at least 1,400 dead in Israeli territory. For their part, Israel’s air attacks on the Strip have caused at least 3,000 deaths, most of them civilians and almost two thirds of them women and childrenaccording to Palestinian authorities.

Unanimous condemnation

Different voices, from the European Council to the World Health Organization (WHO), Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and different Governments of the Middle East, North Africa and America hhave raised their voice to condemn the attack. Meanwhile, the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah has called for this Wednesday to be a day “of unprecedented anger” against Israel and has called on the population to take to the streets considering that “complaints are no longer enough.”

Some 2,000 civilians were taking refuge in the health center, belonging to the Anglican Church and in the center of Gaza City, when the explosion killed at least 500 people in what is the largest massacre in the Strip after five wars. between Palestinian militias and Israel since 2008.