DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip— The Israeli military said Tuesday that its double strike on a Gaza hospital that killed 20 people targeted what it believed was a Hamas surveillance camera. But the first strike killed a cameraman from the Reuters news agency doing a live television shot, according to witnesses and health officials.
The military released its initial findings into the strike, offering no immediate explanation for striking twice and no evidence for an assertion that six of the dead were militants, including two who were identified by their employers as a health care worker at the hospital and an emergency services driver. The dead also included five journalists.
The military said the back-to-back strikes on southern Gaza’s largest hospital were ordered because soldiers believed militants were using the camera to observe Israeli forces. But its account appeared to contradict witnesses at the scene of Monday’s attack on Nasser Hospital.
A senior Hamas official denied that Hamas was operating a camera at the hospital.
“If this claim was true, there are many means to neutralize this camera without targeting a health care facility with a tank shell,” Bassem Naim, a member of the group’s political bureau, told The Associated Press in a phone interview.
Questions raised about Israeli military’s account
An initial strike hit a top floor of one of the hospital’s buildings. Reuters cameraman Hussam al-Masri was killed in that blast while filming from the site, according to a fellow journalist and a doctor at the hospital.
Hospital officials said a second person, who has not been identified, was also killed in the first strike.
Health workers, journalists and relatives of patients then rushed up an external staircase to reach the site of the first blast. Photos taken from below showed at least 16 people gathered on the staircase, trying to help those hit. Among them were four men wearing the orange vests of emergency responders or health workers. No one on the staircase was seen holding weapons.
Video footage taken by Al-Ghad TV shows the second strike hitting, causing a large boom and engulfing everyone on the staircase in smoke. Hospital officials say 18 people were killed in the second strike.
The military did not elaborate on why it struck a second time or how it would have identified militants among the crowd on the staircase. Its statement was issued after an initial inquiry into the attack, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “tragic mishap.” He did not elaborate on the nature of any mistake.
Among the six people killed Monday that Israel claimed were militants were Jumaa al-Najjar, a health care worker at Nasser Hospital, and Imad al-Shaar, a driver with Gaza’s civil defense agency, which operates under the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, according to the agency and Nasser hospital’s casualty list.
Without offering evidence, Israel has in the past identified emergency responders who work under the Hamas-run government as militants to be targeted, including in the killing of 15 medics in March, when Israeli troops opened fire on ambulances in southern Gaza.
The military’s chief of general staff acknowledged several “gaps” in the investigation so far, including the kind of ammunition used to take out the camera.
Rights groups condemn `double tap’ attack on hospital
The initial findings emerged Tuesday as a surge of outrage and unanswered questions mounted, after international leaders and rights groups condemned the strikes.
“The killing of journalists in Gaza should shock the world,” said United Nations Human Rights Office spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan. “Not into stunned silence but into action, demanding accountability and justice.”
Among the journalists killed in the strikes was Mariam Dagga, who worked for The Associated Press and other publications.
The Israel-Hamas war has been one of the bloodiest conflicts for media workers, with 189 Palestinian journalists killed by Israeli fire in Gaza in 22 months of fighting, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli army spokesperson, said none of the journalists killed in the strikes was suspected of being associated with militant groups and that they were not targeted.The Israeli military said it is conducting an ongoing investigation into the chain of command that approved the strike. A military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with military guidelines said both of the strikes that hit the hospital were launched from a tank.
Known as “double taps,” such consecutive strikes have drawn condemnation in wars in Ukraine and Syria, particularly when they hit civilians or medical workers racing to help.
International law prohibits attacks on hospitals. A hospital can lose that protection if it’s used for military purposes, but strikes must be proportionate, with measures taken to spare civilians.
Israel has attacked hospitals multiple times throughout 22 months of war in Gaza, asserting that Hamas embeds itself in and around the facilities, though Israeli officials rarely provide evidence to support that claim.
Hamas security personnel have been seen inside such facilities over the course of the war, and parts of them have been off limits to reporters and the public.
