President Joe Biden was asked by a reporter in Israel on Wednesday what made him confident that the Israelis weren’t behind the explosion that killed hundreds at a Gaza hospital on Tuesday.
Biden responded that it was “the data I was shown by my Defense Department.”
Two U.S. officials told ABC News the Pentagon independently concluded the Gaza hospital blast was likely caused by an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short of its target.
I just want to respectfully remind everyone that just because this tragedy was likely not perpetrated by Israel, it does not mean they are absolved of any of the hundreds of war crimes they have already committed.
Just because they did a lot of bad things doesn’t mean that you can blatantly lie about killing 500 civilians and then get away with it. Can Israel lie about Hamas beheading 500 babies? And when they do, are you going to accept the narrative of well even if they didn’t do it, they did a lot of bad things? Don’t think so.
I get why you’re saying that, but that doesn’t help anyone.
I mean, Isreal bombed that same hospital 2 days earlier, was conducting bombing campaigns in the area, ordered the evacuation of the hospital less than 24 hours before, and kept changing their story around it. It was a pretty fair assumption that it was them until more evidence was produced.
Could you please provide a source on the bombing of the same hospital 2 days earlier by Israel?
Better sources as promised:
NY Times (mentioned towards the end of the article): https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/world/middleeast/gaza-hospital-israel-hamas-explained.html
NPR (midway): https://www.npr.org/2023/10/18/1206795861/heres-the-available-evidence-of-what-happened-at-al-ahli-arab-hospital-in-gaza
Sorry for the weird source, I grabbed it from Wikipedia. I could try to find something more reputable later today. It’s hard to find sources on every specific bombing, as they’ve dropped many thousands in the past week.
Edit: This is anglicannews because the Anglican Church runs the hospital, so this is actually about as direct a source as we’re gonna get. (I see that part in the headline now, I was tired when I found this earlier)
Israel was asking every place that had civilians in the north, including this hospital, to evacuate them south. Which itself is highly problematic, but the warnings were not specific to this hospital.
They specifically asked for hospitals to be evacuated in addition to the general evacuation order
You know multiple groups of people can be wrong at the same time right
You know that is exactly what I’m saying, right?
Are both of you people even capable of saying anything which isn’t a question GOD-DAMN
They killed multiple journalists earlier this week and killed at least 6 in a strike on a school and this hospital debacle has drowned all of that out.
Can we hold hamas (and palestine for giving them a holdout) for their war crimes, or is your logic only one-way?
No, people here are incapable of thinking in anything other than black-and-white
You speak the truth, even if it was meant to be sarcastic.
Yeah, because condemning one side means you cant condemn the other…
This is why I asked haha
Yeah, is there any place in southern Gaza that isn’t packed full of the people they told to move there from the north for ‘safety’?
You rather they stay on top of the Hamas terror tunnels Israel is targeting? Hamas would like that.
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Israel has killed thousands and displaced millions…because they think it’s their god given right to conquer the land. most of the country agrees that arabic people should not have the right to live in land that was palestine a few years back.
The goal of palestinian nationalists is literally the same thing with the roles reversed. I fail to see a difference apart from the fact that Israel is stronger and we’re more critical towards it since it’s a democracy and should know better.
Palestinians are brutalized on a daily basis. Their land was stolen after WW2 then slowly usurped and terrorized while the world kept funding Israel. That was originally palestinian land, and there were even jewish communities in that palestinian land. Now it is an ethnostate that lets new yorkers take some guy’s ancestral home because he’s of the correct ethnic category.
e: it’s quite strange to have to explain to people why a genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid is bad.
Palestine as a country has never existed and Jews have as much of a historical claim to the regions as Palestinians do.
So for you, a millennia of history, distinct cultures, and dialect are meaningless. People who migrated and forcibly colonized in 1948, with no connection to the region or land have as much of a claim to it as an ethnicity who has lived there for centuries.
So if that’s your argument do you just believe that israel has the right to go on a conquest and slaughter palestine? Genuine question.
Have you never heard of middle eastern Jews? Genuine question
So if that’s your argument do you just believe that israel has the right to go on a conquest and slaughter palestine? Genuine question.
I don’t believe my comment indicated that. I simply don’t believe that Palestine has the right to go on a conquest and slaughter Israel either.
There are things that Israel did that I strongly disagree with, in recent history most of them are connected to West bank settlements. There are more things that I disagree with that Palestine did. I think that the 1948 UN proposed 2-state solution would have been more than reasonable, and it would have likely put Palestine into a much better position than it’s in now, but one can’t change the past. We’ll see if Israel government becomes more reasonable and thinks of a more current lasting solution, but I’m not holding my breath.
So for you, a millennia of history, distinct cultures, and dialect are meaningless.
Why do you think so? Jews also lived in the area, and the ones who came later afaik generally migrated and purchased their land legally, with the exception of migration during WW2, which was not legal, but imo pretty understandable since it was literally done by refugees running from the holocaust. People argue that it wasn’t kosher since the region was under British control, but before that it was under the control of Osmans and before that the region was afaik under control of someone who conquered it for most of its history. It has never been a country.
Obviously this doesn’t give Israel a claim over the whole region, but I don’t think they have any less of a right for existence than Palestine.
The problem I have with this narrative isn’t who dropped the bomb. Tbh they’re probably right it was a Palestinian missile. It’s the sheer audacity for all these western countries to be shocked and say let’s figure this out, as Israel just dropped like 6000 bombs in 6 days. They’re worried about one bomb but not the 6000 others, cause ya know, those were killing only Hamas and not injured people in a hospital /s.
While the Muslim world looks on in horror at more bombing in a conflict that has been going on for decades, the western world is focused on insignificant details. Who carried out what attack. Who dropped what bomb. Which act is more morally reprehensible. None of this solves the problem of a displaced people. Only the US can pressure Israel to accept a two state solution. That’s the only peaceful solution possible for this conflict imo. The other solution is to wipe out Gaza and the West Bank and everyday we’re getting closer to that.
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The western world is focused on insignificant details. Who carried out what attack. Who dropped what bomb. Which act is more morally reprehensible. None of this solves the problem of a displaced people
Misinformation on the scale of “a building was destroyed that clearly is still intact” deserves focus. If they’ll lie about shit that can be confirmed with a tiny bit of research, what else is getting exaggerated?
I don’t know, most of the papers in the UK led with a front page item on how Israel had killed 500 people by bombing a hospital. So if that wasn’t actually true, it’s quite important.
I doubt that Rishi Sunak speak correctly.
This is the most global headline nơw.
If you have a little deep heart inside, you can think twice. See what difference between two sides. Who is support Israel, the world’s most powerful militaries that every country don’t want take risk to war with. Then, who is support Palestine. There is many country but still behind.
The latest statistics on the Israel-Palestine conflict as of October 19, 2023, are as follows:
Gaza: Killed: At least 3,478 Injured: Over 12,065 Occupied West Bank: Killed: At least 69 Injured: More than 1,300 Israel: Killed: At least 1,403 Injured: At least 3,800
These figures have been reported by the Palestinian health ministry, Palestine Red Crescent Society, and Israeli Medical Services. Please note that these numbers are subject to change as the situation evolves.
And what the trembling moments 1 child killed in Gaza every hour. Precisely more than that. 😥
When 12 of The Council drafted a statement calling for a ceasefire on Wednesday, but the statement was vetoed by the US. WHAT THE F***
Millions of lives hang in the balance, including the 2.3 million civilians half of whom are children in Gaza civilians in Israel, and Jews and Muslims around the world.
I can write more but let just world knows who is the really war criminal.
You don’t have to be Muslim to support Palestine 🇵🇸 … you just have to be HUMAN … 😥
what can third parties do to reduce or eliminate Hamas’s hold on Palestine?
I’m all for Palestinian rights, and the constant encroachment of fundamentalist settlements is a war crime that went unpunished for Israel - but Hamas’s charter is explicit, there’s no middle ground or two state solution, just the destruction of Israel.
So how can third parties help the Palestinians in the one way that would make a significant difference in their QOL and interactions with Israel?
Honest question.
stop funding Israel?
so make Israel an easier target for the many countries that agree with Hamas and think it should be destroyed?
pfft. did you even read the question? How the fuck does that stop Hamas, if anything it would embolden them. How does that help Palestinians wanting a future without a genocidal fuckwit club running their country?
how can we help Palestine?
no not like that
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You’re not going to get any magical solution because Israel is a country founded on stolen land by entitled religious extremists. People always leave that part out when they talk about this situation.
You’re not going to get any magical solution
and yet they all believe in their invisible friends and holy books so much… ironic that.
Israel is a country founded on stolen land by entitled religious extremists. People always leave that part out when they talk about this situation.
funny how you’re leaving out the near extermination of their people and world recognition of their state, kinda glossing over most of history even. guess you decided to leave those parts out too. It’s almost as if both sides are completely full of shit.
Huh.
You also can support Palestinian people and genuinely want their liberation, but have zero love for Hamas or IJ.
Okay well I’m not sure what most of this says, and I know better than to engage in Israel-Palestine discourse online.
The reason for the focus is that it was deliberately being used in a disinformation campaign. Were that not the case, I think you’re right that it would have faded into the background noise as just one bomb among 6000 others.
A two-state-solution doesn’t work in part because extremist Muslim groups want the are to be purely Muslim. They would continue to attack Israel with terror tactics, Like they did from the start. What is your solution to that?
Part of the problem is that Hamas won’t accept a two state solution, either. The people in power on both sides have made it clear that they want the other eradicated. If Hamas and the Israeli government were to disappear then maybe that could happen, but even then there is so much deep rooted hatred amongst those populations for them to realistically live in relative peace while being in such close proximity to each other.
I don’t honestly know of a great solution besides Israel replacing their government, and the ultra nationalistic conservative half of the Gaza strip moving out, or vice versa.
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It’s almost like they went through two attempts to end their people in a twenty-ish year period of time.
I like your take. Most actors involved in this conflict have tunnel vision and that will only lead to more violence.
Even some victims of Hamas’ violence are calling on TV for reflection instead of seeking revenge. Revenge only feeds a never-ending cycle of violence with no end in sight. Israel’s Government will have to own up to having allowed/encouraged Hamas with the single purpose of derailing two-state efforts and that has failed horribly.
People “fighting for their homeland” rarely just give up. And you’ve got two sides who earnestly believe they’re doing just that.
There’s no peace here. Northern Ireland managed it, but the body counts and level of violence aren’t even remotely comparable. It took Israel and Palestine about a week to blow through what The Troubles took 40 years to kill.
Each time it kicks off we in the West wonder how we could solve it. We can’t. It’s not our problem to fix. We certainly had a hand in making it but it’s an impossible tangle of blood, bodies and beliefs that nobody can undo.
The world’s media looks on but we’re mostly just rubbernecking. Few of us have any skin in the game. Takes our mind off our own shit countries I suppose.
There is no two sides. One foreign people wanted another people’s land, and they used some past ancestry / religious fanaticism / racism to commit atrocities in the process of stealing the land.
Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs
Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in '48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew
When former IDF soldiers and Holocaust survivors take a firm anti-Zionist stance, it’s probably because the Zionist side is shit.
Breaking the Silence is also an Israeli organization composed of IDF veterans giving testimonies such as the IDF using ambulances to conceal combatants or using human shields.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You will not achieve peace by totally dismissing one party at the table. You have not proposed any solutions or even a path to a solution.
You have only encouraged more violence by pointing fingers.
Blocked for posting pro-genocide comments.
Even now, my brain won’t ever wrap its head around modern countries like Ireland and N. Ireland feeling the need for things like “peace walls” between neighbors.
Your comment sums up a lot of my feelings: a true peace can’t be forced from the outside. It’s way too complicated and emotional for simplistic shit. And you can see it in the comments around here too. Everyone’s wrapped up in intense anger, blame, and reciting the litany of past horrors as justification for new ones.
Also worth saying that the two sides in Northern Ireland, although originally sundered on the basis of sectarian religion, still shared a suite of cultural commonalities inasmuch as they were all basically from Ireland and the British Isles and had similarly bad teeth, cock-eyed inbred ugliness together with a generalized dislike of anyone perceived as an outsider, but.
In fairness, most of the people in Gaza have been born and raised in an era where the strip is their homeland. They’ve never experienced a settlement, they’ve been ruled by Palestinians their whole lives and the borders were the same as the 1967 ones.
Yeah it’s so fair that they get to live in an open air prison that’s been under blockade for 20 years. You make it sound like Gaza is a functioning country.
An objectively ineffective blockade based on the amount of rocket fire coming out of Gaza.
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Or, you know, a solution that isn’t imposed by western colonialists, maybe? But by the sovereign people that inhabit the region?
https://www.youtube.com/live/Iir51O3JMqc
Otherwise, I agree with everything you said.
It really doesn’t matter what you call them or how you feel about it, Israel is in the position to call the shots and the US is their most influential ally on this. Israel isn’t going to magically go the peaceful route without external pressure, and you have to be fucking joking to think they care what Palestinians care.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/live/Iir51O3JMqc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
what makes you think anything would change if nobody did anything? of course there needs to be an external pressure to change something about the situation. otherwise israel will just keep on decimating palestine population and it will end with a singular state. is that what you want?
I added an Al Jazeera video argument of a single state. It is not a defense of the zionist fundamentalist terrorists state.
It’s a defense of a multi ethnic state, run by the people for the people.
If nobody did anything maybe in 50 years the social indexes may improve by collective work of the people that live there, and know the right priorities, like Vietnam is recovering after the US simply stopped bombing the shit out of that land.
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He was asked on the street by a random reporter.
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His quote includes “likely”
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For the last couple years Bidens off the cuff remarks haven’t exactly been reliable.
Yet people are treating this as an official stance of the US Government…
I’ll take what the president says as the stance of the US government, and I don’t think that’s remotely unreasonable…
If he’s making mistakes with off the cuff remarks, then he needs to stop making off the cuff remarks.
I’ll take what the president says as the stance of the US government
It’s certainly more likely to be the correct way if looking at it than it was a few short years ago.
Well, the president is stopping short of saying it was Hamas yet, so there you go.
Nobody thinks it was Hamas. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is a different Iran-supported group.
No one from the US government has said it was anyone…
Just “it doesn’t look like Israel is responsible”
Yet people are acting like it’s undeniable proof…
Good enough for me.
The same people who jumped on the Israel definitely bombed that hospital bandwagon are now so sure that nothing short of 100% proof could ever sway them
A week ago Biden said he saw beheaded babies
Biden’s been making stupid off the cuff remarks since the 80s, it’s practically what he’s known for.
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“Iraq has WMD’s” is a similar statement, backed by an entire administration, that also led to unnecessary deaths.
Its a political statement, because if Israel did attack the hospital, then that’s another outright war crime right after Israel was threatened by Jordan, Lebanon, and Iran.
Uh, did you miss this part?
Two U.S. officials told ABC News the Pentagon independently concluded
The embedded tweet:
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.
So the investigation isn’t concluded, there might not have even been an official investigation, and all they’re saying is Israel “isn’t responsible”.
None of what OPs headline claims.
That’s a tweet from the white house national security council. That’s completely independent of the article’s claim that two pentagon officials gave them info.
So those two officials haven’t officially said it…
And even if they did say it to journalists, there’s nothing to back it up?
What exactly are you trying to get at? I’ve literally rebuked every claim you’ve made, but your stance just seems to boil down to “they are lying.”
I’ve literally rebuked every claim you’ve made
Many antivaxers and trump supporters have thought the same thing…
Lmao okay buddy. Good job not answering my question.
Wow shocker the pentagon is defending its close partner in the war. Ill beleive them when they actually release evidence not just “The pentagon said so.”
- He was asked on the street by a random reporter.
Out of anything this is the strangest complaint. Why wouldn’t he answer a street reporter?
Because Biden’s biggest fans have spent years defending his misspeaking by saying his stutter makes him get words mixed up when he’s randomly asked questions…
So when he’s stopped to get asked a random question, we need to wait a day or two to see if that’s what he really meant to say, or if his stutter made him somehow say the wrong words again.
If the administration comes out with a revision or clarified updated statement then I’ll likely accept that too. For now, words out of the presidents literal mouth are as much of an official statement that I need.
Must have been a confusing seven years for you then…
Which seven years are you referring to?
For now, words out of the presidents literal mouth are as much of an official statement that I need.
The most recent seven…
I didn’t think I needed to specify that
Admittedly Biden is old and boring and sometimes confusing. Trump was a gaslighter whose words also represented the office, but that I couldn’t trust.
I don’t have to wake up worrying about some dangerous shit that Biden tweeted though. I’ll take this any day of the week.
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For the reference, this is about 500 people:
Some radical estimations talked of -1000 deaths. This is 1000 people:
Both of those estimates come from Hamas sources (well the 1000 people one IDK where you got that from).
JFC people you can criticize Israel without gobbling up a terrorist organization’s fat propaganda dick. For now we just have no way to know how many people died in that hospital. Find another war crime to criticize Israel for, they’re not that hard to come by.
You don’t get it. This is to show how ridiculous 500 people claim is. Was the parking lot full of clown cars? If not, 500 claim is pretty much self evident fake news, let alone a thousand.
Yeah if they’d said a dozen people died I’d believe it. That crater looked like a stick of TNT went up, not a 2000 pound bomb.
If it has exploded directly overhead in the center of 500 people packed like sardines I don’t think it could have killed more than a couple dozen.
Ooh gotcha. Unfortunately I’ve read some wild conspiracy theories about this in the last few days so I immediately thought this was more of the same… sorry lol
I get that. It’s one thing to blame Israel for bombing civilian targets but those Hamas apologists are mental gymnastics Olympians.
Yeah, the hospital wasn’t filled with civilians hurt/running away from bombings after Israel told them to run away because they’re gonna bomb them again.
No way it would have had +500 humans in there.
But the hospital wasn’t hit, the parking lot was.
The parking loot is a part of the hospital.
Does it seem out of this world to you that there would be +500 humans in the parking lot of a hospital in a crisis like this?
Yes, that might be the case under the current circumstances. The above picture helped to imagine what 500 people look like crammed squarely in a space. I doubt the 500 hypothetical people resting in the parking lot were placed more tightly than that.
Next, look at pictures of the detonation crater, which has the size of a sewer manhole. Imagine that explosion going off in the middle of the audience of 500 people. Would they all die from that? The sheer amount of body mass and flesh would shield the people in rows 20+ from the explosion.
I bet you couldn’t kill 500 people with whatever exploded there, if you tied them directly onto the bomb, or rocket, or whatever. Is there any precedent of a terrorist attack or military strike or anything which killed that many people with a similarly small explosion?
You can’t imagine people running away from being bombed being more tightly packed than people attending a conference?
Yes, it seems absolutely impossible. 500 people is a massive number.
You have never seen a parking lot as big as the conference in your image?
You can’t possibly imaging 500 hundred humans running from being bombed staying together in a parking lot of a hospital that is smaller than the conference in your images? You can’t imagine that at all?
I’m sure that some valets manage to get “parking loot”
Are you making fun of this tragedy?
I don’t consider the Pentagon to be a reliable source for information when they have a vested interest in the conflict. Remember when they said Saddam Hussain had “weapons of mass destruction” which was used to justify the Iraq invasion? Well there never were any. The Pentagon manufactured that disinformation, and media parroted it like loyal puppets.
Yeah why are people believing this? I’m sure someone will quietly peddle it back just like they did with the “40 beheaded babies” lie. This is blatant information warfare.
What vested interest does the DoD have in this conflict?
The US State Department has a long-standing strong alliance with the Israelis. Billions of dollars of weaponry is sold to the Israeli military yearly, with a direct profit for the US defense industry.
Israeli airstrikes killing civilians hasn’t stopped weapon sales before, so why would the pentagon lie about this one instance?
Same as any other conflict… maintain the interests of US govt. and by extension rich oligarchs who have the house and Senate in their pockets.
Pentagon. The security agency of the country vetoing ceasefire agreement in the UN security council, in favour of Israel attacks.
Independently of whom, exactly?
We have investigated ourselves and found nothing suspicious.
This reads like: “we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong”…
Yeah, the CIA famously never lies about this stuff on behalf of their country’s military interests!
I mean. Fuck both. But fuck Hamas more.
Nah, fuck both is enough. I will never support jihadists and I will never support apartheid states.
I’ll drink to that.
Is Islamic Jihad distinct from Hamas?
Yes, you can usually find it abbreviated as PIJ and supposedly has ties to Iran
It is a different group. How much they align with each other and/or cooperate, I do not know.
Hamas is the closest thing to a real government that Palestine has. Hamas has stated a willingness to accept a 2 state solution, they used to want all the land back but now they just want peace. Some countries like NZ take the time to differentiate between Hamas (not terrorists, political arm) and Qassam Brigades (the terrorist military arm of Hamas).
As far as I have read PIJ is just terrorist who wanna kill all Israelis.
Hamas is a violent terrorist group whose sole aim is to visit suffering on Israel and it’s people.
The Palestinian Authority is the closest thing to a government that Palestine has and, while it’s corrupt and ineffective, it’s leagues better than Hamas which runs Gaza as a violent gang.
And here we go with the latest attempt at propaganda to make Hamas look like the victims. Yeah, what you said is full of lies. Especially the part about Hamas wanting any kind of solution where Israel exists.
If they (Hamas) really wants two state solutions he would not have blown up Israel indiscriminately.
Remember when we almost had peace but then a Kahanist assassinated Rabin?
Sounds like a very distant fairy tale.
So how is it even related with the issue at hand again? Another make up link of two unrelated incidents?
… differentiate between Hamas (not terrorists, political arm) and Qassam Brigades (the terrorist military arm of Hamas).
So kind of like Sinn Féin vs the IRA, this makes sense.
you mean the hospital parking lot?
Colin Powell has entered the chat.
I haven’t seen anything personally convincing, there’s a photo of a pothole that’s supposed to prove something I guess?
And the US government has a long and costly history of making up accusations against Arab Muslims.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen the videos released by IDF of them bombing Gaza, but those bombs literally bring down entire buildings. They’re massive. If one like that fell on the hospital parking lot there would be a huge hole in the ground and the buildings around would be obliterated. Also if it was JDAM it would not have hit the parking lot unless for some reason that’s what they were targeting. It’s a guided bomb unlike the unguided rockets Hamas is using. JDAMs are accurate to 10 meters or so.
He been stroking it from the hallway
The video seems pretty clear tbh. An aircraft dropping bombs would be quite loud, and a missile would be visible.
Which video was this?
If anyone made it as far as the third sentence in the article, they might notice that “Islamic Jihad” in the title refers to “Palestinian Islamic Jihad”.
They’re not blaming Hamas for this incident. PIJ is a separate organisation.
US have always been Israel’s ambassador. Nothing new here.
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I mean, it doesn’t appear to be out of the range of their other ordinance. Cars burnt out but Clay tiled awning still uncracked, road appears drivable. Unless you’re still working with the outdated information that this was an airstrike that killed ~500If Israel was going to blow up a hospital, they would have done a better job. It’s pretty much the same blowback for partially and completely destroying one.
https://www.newsweek.com/mysterious-case-gazas-al-shifa-hospital-262086
Well heres one hospital strike in 2014 that the consensus is they are responsible for, and again it was a strike that hit off to the side and they claimed someone else did. So in the case where this would have been Isreals fault, it would look very similar to another hospital strike they did do.
They even used the same excuse blaming Gaza terror organizations, not Hamas directly.
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Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets towards Israel. (Pretty much all of them seem to have been blown out of the sky by the “iron dome” defense system.)
