Within minutes of a deadly blast at a Gaza hospital on Tuesday, false and misleading claims about the incident spread across the web.
Palestinian authorities and medical providers reported that the explosion, which took place at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, killed hundreds of people, though the exact figure is unclear. No one took credit for the strike: Gazan officials blamed an Israeli airstrike, and Israel faulted a misfired rocket from the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The United States has said its current assessment is that “Israel is not responsible.”
What is clear, according to reporting on the ground, is the grisly outcome: Numerous civilians who’d sought safety at the hospital amid Israeli airstrikes elsewhere in northern Gaza — many of whom were outside at the time of the blast around 7 p.m. local time — were instantly killed, and many others were severely injured. Other area hospitals, low on supplies and overwhelmed by the scale of the explosion, struggled to respond to the catastrophe.
Details beyond that are scarce, due in large part to the extreme danger and logistical constraints for reporters in Gaza. In their place, OSINT — or “open-source intelligence” — analysts on the web have begun to comb through photos and footage of the blast radius and other details from the scene, with varying interpretations.
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