French intelligence points to Palestinian rocket, not Israeli airstrike, in Gaza hospital blast, official says
An assessment by French military intelligence indicates the most likely cause of the deadly explosion at Gaza City’s Ahli Arab Hospital was a Palestinian rocket that carried an explosive charge of about 11 pounds and possibly misfired, a senior French military official said Friday.
Several rockets in the arsenal of the Palestinian militant group Hamas carry explosive charges of about that weight, including an Iranian-made rocket and another that is Palestinian-made, the intelligence official said.
None of the intelligence pointed to an Israeli strike, the official said.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity, but was cleared to discuss the assessment by French President Emmanuel Macron in what was described as an attempt to be transparent about the intelligence findings. The assessment was based on classified information, satellite imagery, intelligence shared by other countries and open-source information, the official said.
With hundreds of Palestinian civilians reported dead in a Gaza inferno, dueling narratives from Israel and Hamas highlight danger that the war may spread.
Israel declared war on Hamas after the Gaza-based militant group’s deadly Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel that killed some 1,400 people, mostly civilians. Israel has pounded Gaza with airstrikes in the days since, killing more than 4,100 Palestinians, with Gazan militant groups sending rockets into Israel.
The size of the blast crater in a courtyard of the hospital was assessed by French military intelligence to be about 39 inches long, 29½ inches across and about 12 to 16 inches deep.
That is consistent with an explosive charge of about 5 kilograms — about 11 pounds — the official said. The official said the hole appeared to be slightly oriented on a south-to-north axis, suggesting a projectile that hit at an oblique angle on a south-to-north trajectory.
After a hospital blast in Gaza, doctors struggling to save lives amid danger and dwindling supplies say they and the medical system are near collapse.
Officials in Hamas-ruled Gaza quickly blamed an Israeli airstrike for the explosion at the hospital Tuesday. Israel denied it was involved and released live video, audio and other evidence it said showed the blast was caused by a rocket misfired by Islamic Jihad, Palestinian militant group allied with Hamas. The U.S. has said its intelligence supported that finding. Islamic Jihad has denied responsibility.
The death toll remains in dispute. Within just more than an hour of the blast, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said 500 had died. It revised that number to 471 on Wednesday, without giving details of the dead. The Israeli military told reporters that number was inflated.
Israel-Hamas war: In Israel, a quest to identify unrecognizable bodies. In Gaza, bodies are piled and some stored in ice cream trucks as power fails.
While also cautioning that “I have no certitude,” the French military intelligence official said: “We don’t see at all that a rocket that size could have produced 471 dead. It is not possible.”
A United States intelligence report estimated that somewhere between 100 and 300 Palestinians were probably killed.
Even in Gaza there were conflicting estimates of the dead. Ahli Arab Hospital officials said only that the toll was in the hundreds, without giving a firm number.
The general director of Gaza’s largest hospital, Shifa, Muhammad Abu Salima, said he thought the death toll was about 250, based on the casualties he saw streaming into the triage center. Two witnesses said they thought the toll was in the dozens, not the hundreds.
All officials in Gaza have said the blast left scattered body parts, complicating the task of counting the dead.
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