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Identifying Possible Crater from Gaza Hospital Blast - bellingcat
(www.bellingcat.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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So... setting aside the source of this explosive for a moment (because there's a lot of speculation and no firm answer yet), can we all agree that there's no way this killed 500 people? The impact crater is about the size of a sewer manhole (there's one near it in the panorama image in the article).
The initial reporting on this was sensationalized to generate outrage and sympathy.
It's known that their hospital system has servere levels of over crowding, and the article states both that:
And that:
...an over crowded space, babies in cots, with an explosion large enough to flip a car, near one of the few areas with grass soft enough to sleep on.
Plus a fire.
Plus due a hospital low on supplies, low on water, in need of emergency power... Could probably kill hundreds, and cause the death of more.
If the hospital had some structural damage as well. Could probably do plenty of killing. The article doesn't nominate a number, so I can't speak to your source on that.
This is the thing I've been thinking about a lot. I definitely wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere near that explosion, but aftermath sure doesn't seem to line up with "500 people killed in hospital collapse caused by explosion". I don't even see a collapsed building in the panorama shot. Somebody's lying their ass off, and I have no idea who it is.
Based on the pictures in the article, there was definitely some damage to nearby buildings, particularly the roofs of the two buildings to the south. But "collapsed" seems to be sensationalism/clickbait. For that I would blame the journalists doing the reporting.
Here's a clue who's lying. It's the ones who claim that 500 peoole were killed, that's a preposterous figure that Zionist haters lapped up.
The problem is that the Israeli state has done preposterously malicious things in the past. But in this case, Hamas was trying to pull a fast one, and they honestly played a blinder.
People will remember the outrage and disgust they felt, despite the later retraction.
I haven't seen a reputable source yet claim that the deaths weren't in the hundreds, and none lower than 300. That's still an enormous loss of civilian life and not meaningfully distinct from 500, IMO. I do have to go outside sometimes, meaning that I'm not getting second by second updates, so if you have a reputable source to meaningfully dispute the death count, I'd be happy to consider it.
Estimation at best. They probably knew about 500 people were there, but had no idea of a body count.
That being said, a lot of people were sleeping in the grass next to the impact site, and some in the parking lot. They are estimating around 200-300 people. Some of the people in the grass were already dead.
But most were using it as temporary sleeping area due to the destruction of their home.
Last point I'll talk about is that this crater was not caused by an airstrike like Hamas claimed. And the hospital is not destroyed which they also claimed. And the ballistics show that it would have come from not Hamas, but the other faction in the region, the Islamic Jihad group territory.
It seems I owe a few people here an apology.
It shows a strong character, moral compass, openness and social skills to publicly change your opinion/stance.
You have my highest respect.
The other issue is that Hamas released that death count less than thirty minutes after the explosion. There's no way to get an accurate number that quickly.
A pretty plausible scenario is that they realized the fuck up, which probably did cause an extensive number of casualties given that the courtyard was apparently full of civilians, and immediately pushed a story about Israel catastrophically bombing a hospital in order to deflect attention, in hopes that western media would repeat the story without question, which was of course a correct assumption.
Video of the aftermath. It's horrific. ~500 is accurate. When half of them are children it doesn't take up as much space as you think.
spoiler
Seriously, don't click unless you're ok seeing a lot of dead kids https://twitter.com/LocalFocus1/status/1714340397298733479Right, so, this video is addressed in the article:
Did you read the article?
Not to quibble, but two dozen != 500. The difference is significant because of the effect it has had on reporting on the incident.
500 shows such bad faith, get real.
It's one thing to argue who did it because none of us are sure and "evidence" points in both directions but y'all are fucking monsters if you're going to try and downplay the scale of the violence with absolutely no evidence.
The video is horrific indeed - but fortunately (!) way less than than the first reported amount of people died. It is hard to really count but in the video itself it seem that less than 50 dead are shown. We don’t know if every casualty was filmed though.
The tweet itself still blames Israel for this, so the source doesn’t even pretend to be neutral/news.