What do we know about who was responsible for the bombing of the Gaza hospital?

A day after the deadly explosion that hit the Baptist Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, leaving hundreds dead, the United States released its own assessment of what caused the bombing.

Israel has presented evidence that it says shows a failed launch by the radical Islamic Jihad group caused the explosion. Islamic Jihad denies responsibility.

US President Joe Biden reinforced that explanation on Wednesday, citing US intelligence data. A spokesperson for the US National Security Council said analysis of aerial imagery, intercepts and open source intelligence suggested Israel was “not responsible”.

Palestinian authorities and several Arab state leaders, however, accuse Israel of targeting the hospital during the air strikes that the country has been launching in Gaza for more than a week.

The hundreds of deaths, including injured, sick Palestinians and those who used the hospital as a shelter from the bombs, and the images of the bloody consequences generated protests across the Middle East.

What we know about who carried out the bombing so far.

What happened at the hospital?

Video of the moment of the explosion at Al-Alhi Baptist Hospital shows the sky lit up as a huge explosion erupts on the hospital grounds, sending a cloud of flames and smoke into the air. In the building, there was panic.

See the video:

Fadel Na’eem, head of the hospital’s orthopedics department, said he was performing surgery when a deafening explosion sounded in the hospital. He said panic set in as staff rushed into the operating room shouting for help and reporting multiple casualties.

He told CNN in a recorded video: “I just finished surgery and suddenly we heard a big explosion, we thought it was outside the hospital because we never thought they would bomb the hospital”.

After leaving the room, Na’eem said he found an overwhelming scene. “Many people were beheaded. Everywhere there were big fires,” he said. “Medical staff struggled to care for the injured and dying, but the magnitude of the devastation was overwhelming. The number was big, huge, we couldn’t do anything.”

Gaza’s Health Ministry said the death toll was more than 400.

What do Israelis and Palestinians say?

Palestinian officials blamed Israel for the attack on Tuesday night.

Israel Defense Forces spokesman Jonathan Conricus told CNN on Wednesday that “preliminary information” had “evidence that clearly supports the fact that it cannot have been an Israeli bomb.”

Israel says its intelligence shows a “failed rocket launch” by the radical Islamic Jihad group was responsible for the explosion. Islamic Jihad denied these claims as “false and baseless”.

The Israel Defense Forces also released audio in which they claim to have captured a conversation between two operatives from Hamas, another radical Islamic group, in which they talked about launching a rocket from a cemetery near the hospital.

According to a translation of the conversation made by the Israeli Army, one of the alleged agents said: “They are saying that the missile shrapnel is local shrapnel and not like Israeli shrapnel.”

A CNN cannot verify the authenticity of recordings.

On Tuesday, a video posted by the official account of the State of Israel on the social network X, formerly Twitter, was also presented as evidence that the hospital had been hit by rockets fired by the radical Islamic group. However, the timestamp on the video did not match the time the explosion occurred, and the tweet was later edited to remove the video.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Haiat told CNN : “We received the video, we thought it was from an official source, but when we contacted her she said she got it from somewhere else, so we took it down.”

On Wednesday, authorities in Gaza also claimed that Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital was damaged by two Israeli shells four days earlier, and that Israel had warned the hospital administration to evacuate the facility.

What does the US say?

The US government currently assesses that Israel was “not responsible” for the explosion, according to the US National Security Council.

Biden, who was paying a visit to Israel on Wednesday, told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the damage to the hospital “appears to have been caused by the other team, not by you.” “But there are a lot of people out there who aren’t sure, so we have a lot, we have to overcome a lot of things,” Biden added.

Authorities told CNN separately that initial evidence collected by the US intelligence community suggests that the attack on the hospital came from a rocket launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group.

Among the evidence is an analysis of the explosion that suggests it was a ground explosion, not an airstrike, that hit the hospital, one of the sources said. There was no singular crater to suggest the existence of a bomb, but there was extensive fire damage and scattered debris, which is consistent with an explosion starting at ground level, according to the source.

Still, analysis of the explosion is just one of the things being examined by the intelligence community, which has sent resources to gather information in the region.

How did the world react?

Several countries expressed horror at the loss of life at the hospital and called for caution in assigning blame until the circumstances became clear.

The United Nations called for a careful investigation. Until independent investigators can assess the incident in detail, it is unlikely the world will know for sure what led to the explosion.

Israel provided the U.S. with information it gathered related to the deadly hospital explosion in Gaza, according to an Israeli official and another source.

Several Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq, issued statements condemning Israel and accusing its military of bombing the hospital.

Thousands of protesters shouting anti-Israel slogans also took to the streets in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt and Tunisia. Protests also rocked the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah.