The reality behind the mass deaths on Oct. 17 at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital is that Netanyahu has committed Israel to the physical extermination of “Hamas”—but Hamas is not a regular army. The declared goal and the massive aerial bombardment makes clear that anyone that doesn’t obey the order to evacuate Gaza City and north Gaza is therefore effectively “Hamas.” Some of this “Hamas” population, according to Israel, hides in hospitals. Therefore hospitals are targets, and the World Health Organization stated that there had been 115 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza in the first 11 days, and the majority of its hospitals were not functioning.
Israeli authorities have been fully aware that they will create horrors that will shock the world. The Times of Israel wrote on Oct. 13: “A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces urged AIPAC and its followers to stick with Israel as it attacks Hamas even when ‘the going gets ugly’ and ‘the scenes out of Gaza will be hard to stomach.’ Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, the international spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, spoke Thursday evening [Oct. 12, five days before the bombing of the hospital] to a webcast convened by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee about what Israel expected from Americans and especially those who support the pro-Israel lobby. Conricus’s comments came shortly before Israel issued a warning to civilians in Gaza that they should leave the northern part of the Gaza Strip within 24 hours.”
Conricus is the same IDF spokesman who explained to the media yesterday that a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket that hit a parking lot did all the killing.
Israel’s developing narrative is that their aerial imagery fails to show a big crater that would have been produced if they had hit the hospital from the air; hence, a home-made Islamic Jihad (IJ) rocket hitting the parking lot did all the damage. How could it kill so many? Well, the death count must have been smaller.
Yesterday, another Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari presented their “smoking pistol”—an audio recording which he suggests is of two conspirators, caught talking about a rocket their people had misfired. However, even the translation that Hagari presented makes it seem to be of two individuals neither of whom are connected with the Islamic Jihad, trying to make sense of claims they’ve heard that the IJ’s rocket hit on the hospital. They are trying to figure out about claims about which they have no first-hand knowledge. It is unlikely that, if they had been aware at the time of the amount of death and destruction, their entertaining of the IJ rocket allegation would have lasted very long.
Even the statement of U.S. National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson, taken as proof by the warmongering crowd, evidences the complexity of what has been presented as simple: “Intelligence indicates that some Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip believed that the explosion was likely caused by an errant rocket or missile launch carried out by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The militants were still investigating what had happened.”
Finally, two incidents in the first minutes and hours of the explosion indicate that Israel’s government was at pains to fraudulently cast the blame elsewhere. First, a digital aide to Netanyahu, Hananya Naftali, posted a report stating that Israel had struck the hospital, but Hamas was at fault for using “hospitals to store weapons caches and conduct terrorist activity.” Within hours, his posting was taken down and he apologized for his error, but in a fashion so ridiculous that it only raised more questions. His explanation: “As the IDF does not bomb hospitals, I assumed Israel was targeting one of the Hamas bases in Gaza.…” Did he not just assign the blame to Hamas for a hit on a hospital?
That gaffe was soon followed by a video posted on the official State of Israel X account, as evidence that rocket fire from militants had hit the hospital. Unfortunately, the timestamp on the video did not match up with the time that the explosion actually took place, so that video posting was edited out.
