The story of the Gaza hospital hit on Tuesday is emblematic of many features of the Israel Hamas war and even more so of how complex it is to actually tell it. The first news that arrived was tragically terrible and as such was reported by websites, TV and newspapers around the world. But he had a problem: that news had how sole Hamas source and said that the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza had been deliberately hit by an Israeli bombing which had caused 500 deaths. Little of that news was true.
The international secret services studied live footage and images emerging from the Gaza Strip to understand what was the cause of the explosion in the hospital courtyard. From the filming, a one-meter crater with a depth of 30-40 centimeters was detected. These measurements are compatible with a 5 kilogram warhead according to French intelligence. This, added to the calculation of the angle of impact, makes it more likely that it was a rocket fired from inside the Strip. It would have exploded in the air and fallen with its load of fuel in the square of Al Ahli, a hospital founded in 1882 by the episcopal diocese of Jerusalem, where hundreds of civilians had taken refuge.
On Tuesday the Hamas spokesperson had accused the Israelis, speaking of 500 deaths, French intelligence data say the deaths would be between 10 and 50, the US reports up to 300 victims. International media such as the BBC first broke the news with Hamas as the sole source and then reconstructed what happened, arriving at the conclusion that the cause would be a rocket fired by Islamic Jihad with a malfunction that seems to be one in six.
Was it a mistake to immediately report news that only had one source? The speed of communication leads to this obviously indicating what the source is. In this, however, there were two major inconsistencies that should have caught the eye, but which were only highlighted later. The first is that of the single source, moreover from a terrorist organisation. The second is that Israel, which immediately said it had not done so and brought evidence to support the other reconstruction, had no advantage in attacking a hospital full of civilians on the eve of the visit of American President Joe Biden, its main ally, who for days he had reiterated his no to an escalation of the conflict.
The dissemination of this news in the first immediate version and only later revised and corrected, led to a proliferation of hatred that does not seem to have rebalanced. This is because public opinion is increasingly polarized and, in the sounding board that is social media, grasps more easily and embraces what she is already at least partially convinced of. And on the other hand she gets indignant to the point of anger. All too often based on facts that we are unable to truly reconstruct and which are in any case confused online with others that have no basis, but which on social media seem to have the same value.
Source: Vanity Fair
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