Photo by Belal Khaled/Anadolu via Getty Images
- Hamas and Israel traded blame over a deadly explosion at a hospital in Gaza City on Tuesday.
- The White House said that after its own analysis, it concluded Israel is not responsible.
- An official said this current assessment is based off imagery and open source information.
The current US assessment is that Israel isn't to blame for Tuesday's deadly explosion at a hospital in Gaza, a White House official said on Wednesday following an independent analysis of the incident. The assessment comes as President Joe Biden's makes a high-stakes visit to the war zone.
"While we continue to collect information, our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday," White House National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in an official statement shared to X, the social media platform formally known as Twitter.
After a deadly blast occurred at the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City Tuesday, Hamas immediately accused Israeli forces of carrying out an airstrike against the facility. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), however, pushed back on the accusation and asserted after an investigation that the explosion was caused by a "failed" rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group.
Israel presented evidence that included video, a purported audio call, and satellite imagery.
Biden, who is in Israel meeting with top officials, told reporters that data provided to him by the Pentagon leads him to believe that Israel was not responsible for the incident. NBC and ABC News, citing American officials, reported that an independent US assessment of the explosion indicated that the culprit to be a failed Palestinian rocket rather than an Israeli airstrike.
"But the point is this — that I was deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday. And based on what I've seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not — not you. But there's a lot of people out there who are not sure," the president said Wednesday.
Independent analysts also said in social media commentary that images of the damage at the hospital are inconsistent with what would be expected from an Israeli bombing. The lack of a massive crater and little structural damage to cars in the immediate vicinity are telling.
Hundreds of people are reported to have been killed in the explosion at the healthcare facility, which came just hours before Biden was expected to leave the US for a day-long trip to Israel and Jordan, the latter of which was canceled.