FALSE-Did Hamas bomb the Mamdani Hospital in southern Gaza?

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(This text is a translation of the article published on October 18th, titled’’هل قامت حماس بقصف مستشفى المعمداني جنوب غزة؟)

In the aftermath of the devastating bombardment that struck Al-Muadhami Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip, resulting in the loss of hundreds of civilian lives and sparking global outrage and protests from both nations and governments, as well as condemnations from international organizations, news emerged suggesting that this tragedy was the result of a "failed rocket launch" by the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas.

In the first phase of fact checking  this news, we sought to trace the primary source responsible for propagating these claims. It was discovered that the first to make this assertion was Daniel Haggari, the commander of the Israeli military, who stated in a press conference that the Israeli army bore no responsibility for the bombing. Instead, he directed blame towards the Palestinian resistance forces, particularly Hamas, alleging that "their intelligence and information confirmed that a failed rocket launch by Hamas was the cause of the explosion."

The Palestinian Ministry of Health revealed that the Israeli occupation forces had executed their threat of committing a massacre within the hospital, resulting in the tragic loss of hundreds of lives, including children, women, and the elderly. The ministry affirmed that this horrific and heart-wrenching massacre, witnessed by the entire world, leaves the occupier with no way to absolve itself of this crime.

In a subsequent stage, the Tunisia Fact-Checking team examined the Twitter account of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where a video clip was posted, alleging that "Al-Jazeera recorded the moment when the Islamic Jihad movement launched a missile that missed its target and hit a hospital in Gaza, resulting in the deaths of hundreds." This claim spread widely on social media after it was shared by pages and personal accounts

Using the reverse search engines, we searched for the source of the alleged video, it showed that the video clip was extracted from a live broadcast of Al Jazeera in the Gaza Strip, dates back to violent raids by the occupying entity targeting the Zeitoun area and the north-eastern outskirts of the Shejaiya neighborhood in the Gaza Strip 30 minutes before the attack that targeted the hospital.

Many users of social networking sites posted scenes illustrating the difference between the resistance rockets and the Israeli rockets, where some users posted a video showing three scenes of different rocket strikes. The first scene shows the sound of a rocket fired by the resistance on Ashkelon, and the second scene shows the sound of the American JDAM bomb used by the occupation forces, which resembles the sound of the rocket that hit the Hospital and appears in the third scene.