There are fake accounts, old videos and rumors around the hospital explosion
The explosion of a Gaza hospital in October 2001: Israel’s response to the New York Times and the Jerusalem Post-Newtonian Alert
The explosion was claimed to have been caused by an Israeli rocket attack and that hundreds of people had perished, making it one of the worst attacks of the current conflict between Israel and Hamas. The New York Times ran with the claim, pushing notifications to people’s phones with the news that Israeli rockets had killed Palestinians in a hospital in Gaza. According to the New York Times alert, Israeli strikes on hospitals have killed hundreds.
The explosion was not caused by a rocket from the arsenal of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The open source investigations group Bellingcat has a researcher named Kolinatai Koltai who is sifting through video and images for clues about the hospital explosion. She and her colleagues have been cautious about making any declarative statements before they have a fuller understanding. She emphasizes that this work takes time and patience.
The displaced Palestinians were in a courtyard outside the hospital at the time of the blast. The small courtyard had several parked cars and a few grassy patches where people appear to have congregated.
Israel has conducted thousands of air strikes on Gaza in the twelve days since a wave of attacks by Hamas militants killed more than a thousand Israelis. The hospital was hit by Israeli fire in October, according to church officials and the Ministry of Health.
The explosion at the hospital: “Its like an explosion from an Israeli bombardment,” says the hospital’s operating room commander, Osman Yukawa
Video clips show the explosion at the hospital, and NPR independently verified that they are from there.
One video, which is a live broadcast feed, shows a rocket launch from west of the hospital. The object appears to break apart above the hospital moments before the blast.
He told NPR that he was in the operating room when the explosion occurred. He raced to find people with amputations and other serious injuries in the courtyard after hearing the blast. He said some of them died in our hands.
In a statement on Tuesday, the group said video footage and the extent of the destruction showed that the blast was caused by an Israeli aerial bombardment.
The lack of both shrapnel damage and structural damage to the hospital is inconsistent with all types of commonly used Israeli bombs and artillery shells, he says.
Israeli forces and Gazan health ministry are investigating the attack on Israel triggered by a terrorist group in the Gaza Strip on June 23, 2015, according to Garlasco
Death estimates vary greatly, but are believed to be in the hundreds. According to Garlasco, such a high death toll is an extreme high of anything he’s seen. He said that it was plausible since so many Palestinians left their homes to seek refuge in a small number of supposedly safe locations.
A hospital in the Gaza Strip was badly damaged by an explosion a few days after Hamas staged a terrorist attack on Israel that led to the start of the war.
The competing claims have not been independently verified. The various accounts are being assessed by the New York Times through an analysis of photos, video footage and other evidence.
The Israeli military said Wednesday morning that the number of casualties was inflated. The Gazan health ministry, which is run by Hamas, said later on Wednesday that 471 people had been killed and hundreds more injured.
The figures could not be independently confirmed, though video footage verified by The New York Times shows scores of bodies strewn across the hospital’s courtyard.
She said the United States was collecting information and that the assessment was based on available reporting.
The United States was confident that the launch wasn’t from Israeli forces, based on the data collected from the sensors, said a senior Defense Department official.
In a phone interview with The Times on Wednesday, a spokesman for the group, Musab Al-Breim, said that the capacity of their weapons supply was “primitive.”
What We Know About the Explosion at the Gaza Hospital as Explained: An Israeli spokesman told the Israeli army that the explosion had been launched by the terrorist Islamic Jihad
In the hours after the attack, @Israel, the official Israeli account on X (formerly Twitter), posted a video it claimed was proof that the explosion was the result of a misguided rocket launched by Islamic Jihad militants. But within minutes, Aric Toler, a former Bellingcat researcher who now works for The New York Times, pointed out that the time stamp on the video showed 8 pm local time, a full hour after the explosion took place.
The military wing has been accused of killing Palestinians in the past. I am not going to deny the mistakes we have made. These are not mistakes of this size.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the chief spokesman for the Israeli military, said the Palestinian group fired 10 rockets at 6:59 p.m. on the night of the explosion, and that one of them fell to earth prematurely, hitting a parking lot outside the hospital.
The kind of impact that would have been caused by an Israeli missile was not shown in a photo posted on social media, he said. The photo shows the effects of a fire — burned-out cars and scorched ground — that he said was caused by rocket fuel.
There were suggestions the strike was caused by an Israeli air defense missile, but Hagari said that Israel does not fire missiles into Gaza.
The admiral played a wiretapped conversation between two members of Hamas in which one of them said that damage was caused by a rocket fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad at a hospital. The material has not been verified by the Times.
The Israeli military had called the hospital managers at least three times in the last week, asking its patients and staff to leave, according to the archbishop.
The hospital warnings were not part of the larger push to encourage Gazans to leave for the south, said the archbishop.
Amnon Shefler said that the calls to the hospital were part of a broader campaign to encourage people in northern Gaza to leave. Colonel Shefler said the hospital was not a target for the military.
WIRED: The Misinformation about the Gaza Hospital Explosion and the Damnation of Hamiltonian Journalism Throughout the Media Era
All of the reporting was made possible by Emma Bauola, Iyad Abuheweila, Patrick Kingsley, Haley Willis, YouSUR Al-Hlou, and Peter Baker.
“There’s just been this massive sort of pressure to get videos out there, get your take, get your analysis, and it’s like a perfect storm for chaos,” Kolina Koltai, a senior researcher at open source intelligence (OSINT) news outlet Bellingcat, tells WIRED.
The rapid spread of false information, old videos, and bogus accounts make it difficult to establish accountability for the tragedy, as well as the speculation and suspicion that came from the shifting accounts in the news outlets.
Even before evidence was available and fully assessed, many people had already made up their minds about whether Israel or Palestinians were to blame for the carnage. Protests broke out across the Middle East and a planned summit between President Joe Biden and Palestinian, Egyptian, and Jordanian leaders was canceled.
“There really so far does appear to be a flood of misinformation in a very short time, and in a way that’s having a material impact on the diplomacy around the conflict, on the mass mobilization and protests, some of which have the ability to lead to violence,” said Daniel Silverman, a political science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies war and misinformation. It’s hard to argue that misinformation is not a central story.
Another video claiming to show the hospital blast was posted in 2022, it’s a common tactic of recycling and misrepresenting conflict footage.
“A lot of people will use the situation in order to make you believe something about it, which is great for them, because they have a really good assessment of what happened,” said E. Li, a researcher and founder.
Read David and Vittoria Elliot’s WIRED story about how disinformation is getting worse on X. Read David on the role misinformation played in coverage of the recent Gaza hospital explosion. Also read David’s story about how posts by X owner Elon Musk are seemingly making the platform’s misinformation problems worse.
On Tuesday, an X account purporting to be a journalist at Al Jazeera claimed to have seen eyewitness evidence that the hospital was hit by a Hamas rocket. The account was not a journalist by this name, Al Jazeera said. A quick perusal of the account’s posts showed that until very recently it had been posting about Indian politics and trolling Pakistan’s cricket team.
The account was taken down, but not before it gained followers and was shared by other large accounts, including the conservative group in the U.S.
Many of the false or misleading claims about the Israel-Hamas war and the hospital explosion are being made by accounts carrying checkmarks. Those used to signal an account was who it said it was, but under Musk, anyone can pay an $8 monthly subscription fee to get one. If the posts get enough views, the accounts with the checkmarks can earn advertising money.
The way the platform has been shifted just rewards, encourages, and incentivizes the bulls.
What Happened to the Israel-Hamas Attack: A Fake Facebook Page that Reported Its Defamation on NewsGuard
One post from a checkmarked account contained a fake Facebook page that looked to show Israel’s military claiming credit for the attack. It received more than a million views. The post has been deleted but many people using the same language are still on X.
According to NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news sources, nearly three-quarters of the 250 most-engaged posts on X promoting false or unsubstantiated narratives about the conflict were made by accounts carrying subscription checkmarks.
We want to know what happened right away. And sometimes we don’t have answers right away,” she said. “In times like this, where you can’t take the slow, methodical work that usually [open-source investigation] requires, it could have really dangerous repercussions.
Some X accounts claim to do open- source investigations from rapid pushes of definitive takes that later turn out to be wrong.
The environment is making it difficult to understand what happened and to make sure it doesn’t turn into a disaster.
Everyone knows that misinformation lives everywhere. A lot of misinformation, false accounts and doctored photos are shared and passed around on social media by people who think they are giving accurate information. It’s a big problem in the best of times, but the stakes become much higher during a heated crisis like the current Israel-Hamas war. As the violence in and around Gaza has continued to escalate, people are turning to places like X (aka Twitter) for the latest news on the conflict. Researchers say that they’ve never before encountered a flood of bad info such as fake photos and old videos.
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Israel on Wednesday denied a false report claiming that a Gaza hospital was attacked by a rocket fired by Hamas. The New York Times had reported that an explosion at the hospital killed hundreds of people and claimed that it was hit by a rocket. The Israeli military said the rocket belonged to Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad.