PARIS:
On Friday, the French military intelligence directorate (DRM) concluded that a blast at a hospital in Gaza was not caused by an Israeli missile strike but rather by a misfiring Palestinian rocket.
According to Palestinian authorities, 471 people were killed in Tuesday’s explosion at Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital. The Health Ministry in Gaza immediately blamed an Israeli air attack, although Israel claimed the explosion was the result of a failed rocket fire by militants.
“There is nothing that allows us to say that it is an Israeli strike, but the most likely (scenario) is a Palestinian rocket that had a firing incident,” according to the DRM.
Reuters obtained a copy of an unclassified US intelligence analysis on Thursday, which concluded that Israel was not to blame for the explosion and estimated that 100–300 people had lost their lives as a result.
The DRM concludes that the size of the impact crater rules out the possibility that it was created by an Israeli missile.
The DRM told reporters that small-calibre rockets with that sort of explosive charge were available to Palestinian organizations and that this was the “most likely hypothesis.”
In light of the conflicting accounts of responsibility, the DRM, at the direction of President Emmanuel Macron, decided to make public its findings.
Multiple hypotheses were eliminated, including those involving intercepted missiles or splinters from Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system.
Light structural damage at the hospital, including some shattered windows, few wrecked vehicles, and relatively limited presence of civilian goods at the blast site, were all taken into account in the research based on publicly available information.
The DRM did not assign guilt to any particular party and were unable to specify the rocket’s original location of launch.
It did not provide a death toll estimate, but noted that it was probably lower than 471.
After Hamas gunmen killed 1,400 Israelis on October 7, Israel vowed to destroy the organization, effectively isolating the 2.3 million residents of Gaza. More than 4,100 people have been killed and over a million have been displaced as a result of the attacks on the enclave.
