Who is responsible for the Gaza hospital explosion? Here’s why it’s hard to know what’s real
“When you see people in a role like that make a claim, take it back, post a video and delete the video, it’s difficult, not only for us to do our job, but for the public to figure out what “Going on,” says Koltai.
The post on Israel’s official account was subsequently edited to remove the video while maintaining the claim that the attack was not the result of an Israeli attack.
Meanwhile, social media was flooded with videos and images purporting to provide evidence of the origins of the attacks Accounts that make final judgments about those they claimed were responsible for the attack, all without concrete evidence.
For experts in the OSINT community who have worked on incidents like this for years, the confusion and misinformation have been frustrating. Figuring out what happened takes time, and the flood of misinformation has only made that job more difficult.
“That’s because we’re trying to track a missile at night through a few live streams, a surveillance camera and a phone camera,” an OSINT researcher who posts anonymously on social media under the username OSINTtechnical tells WIRED. “Oh, and there are bad actors who intentionally try to muddy the waters. I would say we still have an acceptable amount of resources to take care of Gaza, but it will take some time to fully analyze everything.”
The researcher adds that their work was made extremely difficult by the media, which claimed that Israel was responsible. “This blows everything up,” says OSINTtechnical.
Koltai says she began figuring out what happened within hours of the incident before her colleagues in Europe took over today. Although he was among the first to begin investigating the incident this afternoon Bellingcat had not yet confirmed this how the attack happened or who was responsible for it.
Likewise those BBC Verify team released The analysis of the explosion was carried out based on the available information, but could not draw any conclusions about the exact incident. Several videos shot on cell phones and shared on social media appear to show the moment of the explosion from different angles. A livestream run by Al Jazeera shows two flashes, one further from the camera and one much closer, which some claim shows the rocket launch followed by the explosion. Footage taken this morning shows the hospital parking lot and what Appears to be a small impact crater. The footage shows damage to several cars, but only minor damage to the outside of the hospital building.
