NYT: Hamas failed to produce evidence to back allegation that hospital blast was caused by Israeli strike
The New York Times, which repeatedly and prominently featured Hamas’s claim that the blast last week at Gaza City’s al-Ahli Baptist Hospital was caused by an Israeli airstrike, now says the terror group has not provided, or even described, any evidence to back up its accusation.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza immediately blamed last Tuesday’s explosion on an Israeli airstrike.
However, Israel produced evidence showing it was caused by a failed rocket launch from Gaza at Israel by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group, an assessment endorsed by the United States, which has said it has its own data to this effect.
The New York Times says Hamas refused requests to show evidence of the munition that it claimed had hit the hospital.
“The missile has dissolved like salt in the water,” senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad tells the newspaper. “It’s vaporized. Nothing is left.”
In a text message to the newspaper, Salama Maroof, the head of the Hamas-run government’s media office, says: “Who says we’re obligated to present the remnants of every rocket that kills our people? In general, you can come and research and confirm for yourself from the evidence we possess.”
An investigation by the Wall Street Journal has backed Israel’s version of events, as do assessments by CNN and the Associated Press.
The Israeli military has presented an intercepted conversation between Hamas officials saying the explosion was caused by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad projectile that fell short, and has provided images showing that the parking lot where the blast occurred didn’t have a crater in the ground and no structural damage had been dealt to nearby buildings — both of which would typically have been left by an IDF strike.
The US intelligence community believes that 100-300 people were killed at the Al-Ahli Hospital, while a European official put the toll at 50 or less.
Hamas health authorities swiftly put the death toll at 500, a number that was widely reported worldwide despite the fact that the terror group’s figure could not be independently verified.