October 18 - Israel/Palestine update

Who's really behind the bombing of the al-Ahli Hospital?

Amidst the fog of war and propaganda, and the 24/7 non-stop information flow, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s actually happening. This is why I’ve decided to start providing these updates — every one or two days — on the Israel-Palestine war (or, more precisely, Israel’s war on Palestine), highlighting the most important stories relating to the conflict.

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Let’s start, as always, with the death toll. News reports yesterday were putting the number of people killed in Gaza at over 3,000 — including more than 1,000 children (not even UN-run schools are safe anymore). In other words, one third of casualties are kids.

The deaths keep mounting at such speed that according to the UN “Gaza is now even running out of body bags”.

And these numbers came out before the news of the horrific bombing of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, which occurred yesterday evening (local time). According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, at least 500 people were killed in a huge blast which destroyed most of the building.

The scene on site was said to be one of pure horror. Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director of Human Rights Watch, wrote: “In 10+ years as a human rights defender, I’ve been to morgues after mass killings & the cells of Guantanamo. Seen lots of anguish & cruelty. But the scenes I’m seeing of the aftermath of the strike on Al-Ahli Hospital have left me at a loss for words. Abject horror. THIS MUST END”.

Sources close to the Israeli military — such as Hananya Naftali, a leading Israeli influencer and Zionist hardliner — initially took credit for the bombing.

Then, as soon as news of the massive number of civilian casualties started to emerge, they backtracked. Naftali, for example, quickly deleted the above tweet and blamed the attack on Hamas, saying that the hospital was hit by a Palestinian rocket that misfired. This is now the official position of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli government — with the only difference that the missile is said to have been fired by another militant group close to Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). But apart from a few grainy videos, they haven’t really provided much in terms of evidence.

This is a developing story, so I’m not claiming to know what happened — I haven’t seen any hard evidence that it was an Israeli bomb either, and in the crossfire of social media propaganda distinguishing fact from fiction is becoming harder than ever.

However, as Caitlin Johnstone has pointed out, several mainstream media reporters have been questioning the Israeli narrative. MSNBC foreign correspondent Raf Sanchez, for example, quickly pointed out that PIJ rockets don’t tend to do that kind of damage, but Israeli missiles do. He also noted that Israel has an extensive history of lying about this sort of thing.