Human Rights Watch: Evidence Points to Misfired Rocket but Full Investigation Needed
"The explosion that killed and injured many civilians at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on October 17, 2023, resulted from an apparent rocket-propelled munition, such as those commonly used by Palestinian armed groups, that hit the hospital grounds, Human Rights Watch said today. While misfires are frequent, further investigation is needed to determine who launched the apparent rocket and whether the laws of war were violated." Continue reading here.
"The explosion that killed and injured many civilians at al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on October 17, 2023, resulted from an apparent rocket-propelled munition, such as those commonly used by Palestinian armed groups, that hit the hospital grounds, Human Rights Watch said today. While misfires are frequent, further investigation is needed to determine who launched the apparent rocket and whether the laws of war were violated." Continue reading here.
The facts of the tragic explosion at al-Ahli Hospital on 17 October remain unclear and a final answer to what happened may not appear, even once the war in Gaza is over and an independent ground-level investigation ground level investigation is carried out. As might be expected, some 30 Palestinian NGOs issued a statement criticizing the HRW report as based on limited evidence and lack of access to the site - https://bit.ly/46AisVp.
ReplyDeleteIt is also important to see the detailed study of what seems to be the same video evidence studied by the NY Times on 24 Oct and Deutsche Welle on 27 Oct. https://bit.ly/3GnQpxq. Neither investigation reached a firm conclusion, but both came to very different conclusions from HRW on the video evidence presented by Israel.
As the NY Times report says, "The footage has become a widely cited piece of evidence as Israeli and American officials have made the case that an errant Palestinian rocket malfunctioned in the sky, fell to the ground and caused a deadly explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.
But a detailed visual analysis by The New York Times concludes that the video clip — taken from an Al Jazeera television camera livestreaming on the night of Oct. 17 — shows something else. The missile seen in the video is most likely not what caused the explosion at the hospital. It actually detonated in the sky roughly two miles away, The Times found, and is an unrelated aspect of the fighting that unfolded over the Israeli-Gaza border that night.
The Times’s finding does not answer what actually did cause the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital blast, or who is responsible. The contention by Israeli and American intelligence agencies that a failed Palestinian rocket launch is to blame remains plausible. But the Times analysis does cast doubt on one of the most publicized pieces of evidence that Israeli officials have used to make their case and complicates the straightforward narrative they have put forth."
To trace the object in the sky back to Israeli territory, The Times synchronized the Al Jazeera footage with five other videos filmed at the same time, including footage from an Israeli television station, Channel 12, and a CCTV camera in Tel Aviv. These different videos provided a view of the missile from north, south, east and west. Using satellite imagery to triangulate the launch point in those videos, The Times determined that the projectile was fired toward Gaza from near the Israeli town of Nahal Oz shortly before the deadly hospital blast. The findings match the conclusion reached by some online researchers.
In addition, the videos show that the projectile in the Al Jazeera footage was launched after the barrage of Palestinian rockets Israeli officials assessed was responsible for the hospital explosion.
From 6:59 p.m. on Oct. 17, barrages of Palestinian rockets are fired from two positions southwest and northwest of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, the videos show. Flames from the Palestinian rockets are visible in the nighttime sky as their engines propel them northeast toward Israel. More than 25 seconds elapse between the final Palestinian rocket and the hospital explosion.
The Times cannot independently identify the type of projectile that was fired from Israel, though it was launched from an area known to have an Iron Dome defense system. The Israeli military says it doesn’t fire Iron Dome interceptors into Gaza, and indeed the missile seen in the video may not have crossed over into Gazan territory. The Israeli military has stated that the Iron Dome did not shoot any interceptors in the questioned time and area."