Israel / Palestine

If the hospital was an Israel target, I would expect there would just be a massive crater and nothing left

No offence but this is a very naïve expectation.

If you were going to bomb a hospital then deny it, maybe you'd be a bit more subtle than just dropping a big bomb on it?

Israel has a track record of using cluster munitions, and they've just got a fresh delivery from the US:
https://inews.co.uk/news/world/us-sending-controversial-cluster-munitions-israel-2692215

Ground burst cluster munitions are exactly the kind of bombs that would leave a scene like there was at that hospital where there was relatively little damage to buildings but lots of dead people.

I'm not saying Israel definitely did it. We don't know. But what I'm seeing is a lot of people accepting Israeli analysis when it's not like they haven't got a vested interest.

To add to this, every Arab commentator I've seen post or friend I've spoken to believes the audio is fake and inconsistent with the local dialect and Arabic speech in general. In any case, I didn't hear any clear admission in that audio, just a discussion between two dudes about what likely happened.

I understand the language too but am not native. Something seemed off, probably the second operative who sounded like he was on some hard drugs or half asleep lol.

C4's take https://twitter.com/AaronBastani/status/1714935328438407450

Bastani - Channel 4 overtly saying the clip of two ‘Palestinians’ discussing Al Ahli hospital - disclosed by Israel in response to it being bombed - is fake, is the bravest reporting a U.K. broadcaster has done in a very long time.

It's a 2-minute segment, and he clearly hasn't listened to it.

Do you think the English news presenter is making his own judgement on whether the recording is real or fake? They asked experts like you'd normally do.

It’s impressive that the 4 figure death count of Palestinians since 7th Oct is obfuscated by one attack. Bombing a hospital is disgusting, but so is bombing civilian residential blocks and labour centres, and there’s total certainty about who’s destroying those.

There’s a lot of people saying that Israel has weapons that could do this, which of course they do.

The munitions expert Dylan Griffith that MEM are referencing says it sounds similar to the JDAM guided bombs and also he mentions that Israel has them, so easy to make a link.
For quite some time people have been saying it was a JDAM on social media and the news, perhaps from his assessment.

People have since said that the JDAMs are too powerful, and there is no impact crater or massive destruction, so the theory then moves to - oh Israel must have used something else in their arsenal. At that point the munitions expert’s assessment that it sounded like a JDAM doesn’t match up.
Then people say that a JDAM can be air bursted which would explain the lack of crater, and link videos of the bomb being used that way. Again, the videos and images from the hospital don’t appear to show the level of damage that such a bomb would cause (trees still instant, cars upright, in largely their parked locations)

The expert also says that although they have larger rockets, the majority of the rockets that Hamas use are small. So the chances are that if it was a Hamas rocket failing it wouldn’t have caused much damage. But also the chance is there that it was the larger rocket.

If this chap gets discredited or debunked, I don’t think that will change a lot of people’s opinions, they’ll go to the next expert that fits the narrative.

Same with the Hamas failed rocket narrative.

Do you think the English news presenter is making his own judgement on whether the recording is real or fake? They asked experts like you'd normally do.

The presenter stated what they had been told by the Palestinian experts, and then heavily enunciated 'they say', at the end, making it clear that he was reporting their opinions. By no means is that

Channel 4 overtly saying the clip... is fake

Ok? Take it up with the guy on twitter.

Something I haven’t seen considered here so far is motive. Israel bombing a hospital looks terrible, they depend almost entirely on western support, it doesn’t look good. They have accurate, western equipment to lay waste to the whole of Gaza, they can kill everyone there if they want to, so it’s just not worth hitting a hospital considering the kickback. I think the home-made Hamas rocket going wrong is far more plausible.

Well, I'm not on Twitter, so I thought I'd mention it to the guy who's reposting him, but he's having a bit of a hissy fit about it.

No one seems to mention that Israel already hit the same hospital at the weekend

This was my opinion on things, I wrote something similar before, tactically it seems a bad move.
But people reminded me that Israel have a record of hitting hospitals and killing civilians (though not on this scale) and that strategically wiping out all Palestinians is their goal, so they must have done this.

You think I'm having a hissy fit? Not being funny but you seem to really struggle to understand sentiment across written language. I don't give 2 shits what a born again Tory thinks.

A JDAM is just a regular 'dumb' bomb with a GPS+inertial guidance kit. Pretty sure there's nothing specific about the damage they'd cause.

The suggestion that they're too powerful also makes no sense. JDAM equipped bombs range from 500 to 2000lb.

We're in the fog of war, and the fog of a propaganda war.
Why speculate now, so far removed from facts on the ground?

Because something confirms your prejudices, obvs

I wonder how much evidence would be required for people to accept Israel’s explanation?

Hamas or Iran are clearly not going to do an investigation. Looks like the UN are going to investigate? Not that any Hamas’ political or military allies will accept their assessment.

I’ve probably got this wrong so please don’t shoot me down. But, doesn’t it seem a bit mad that Palestine would go pick a fight with Israel? Before anything happens you know already that any provocation against Israel would be met with a colossal counterattack. Which Palestine couldn’t withstand.

Bombing hospitals is nothing new though, they've struck hospitals something like 22 times this week alone and target hospitals every time the conflict goes hot. They usually don't suffer much blowback from Western governments on it and I don't see why they would have expected outrage in this instance.

I think the litigation of this one incident is a distraction from what appears to be a general policy of attacks on civilian infrastructure and concentrations (bombing safe routes that they had declared, or border crossings that they had told civilians to use, for example).

Just under 5% percent of buildings destroyed so far

Yes, it does seem pretty mad. I think the only thing I could suggest is that Palestinians can't withstand the status quo either (conditions in Gaza were already 'unlivable' according to Israel's own assessment of the impact of their policies) so they're pretty fucked either way - and they do seem to have succeeded in sabotaging normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi.

Political/religious extremists that are against any peace process. These factions exist on both sides, Hamas and Zionist militias.

Have you not seen any of the genocidal, megalomania-level messages Israeli politicians and military officials have been calling for? This wasn't the first hospital they bombed (assuming it is them) and it won't be the last. They've targeted UN run schools, churches, hospitals and everything else you would hope is safe. The catastrophe of this one just had too much backlash, that they had to back pedal.

Their own head of digital operations from the IDF publicly praised and took ownership of the attack, until he realised what a shit thing to do that was, and then deleted his tweet.

The motive? Well going by that tweet and many, many other things they've said in the public domain, it's the usual BS about it being a Hamas base, or Hamas using human shields blah blah blah...

Funny they keep talking about Hamas and human shields while they've bomb the crap out of one of the most densely populated places on earth where mostly women and children are dying..

That wasnt an exhaustive list obviously. The point was that there are political/religious extremists that are against any peace process on both sides which is why we keep seeing irrational behaviour.