The US president, Joe Biden, said Pentagon intelligence suggests that the devastating explosion at a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday night was caused by “the other team” and not an Israeli airstrike. A White House spokesperson said the US does not believe that Israel is responsible for the explosion at the Gaza hospital based on its analysis of currently available data.
Gaza’s health ministry said in a statement that 471 Palestinians were killed and more than 314 wounded at the al-Ahli Arab hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip. Its spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qidra, called it an “Israeli massacre”. Palestinian officials have blamed an Israeli airstrike for the blast. Israel states that it was caused by a failed rocket launch from inside Gaza by Islamic Jihad, who have denied it.
In a press conference the Israel Defence Forces spokesperson denied Israeli culpability. He produced what Israel claimed was evidence of an intercepted conversation between Hamas operatives discussing the failure of an Islamic Jihad rocket, and aerial imagery which Israel claims shows the blast could not have been caused by IDF fire. He said “radar system tracked rockets fired by terrorists from within Gaza at the time of the explosion”.
Before leaving the country, Biden cautioned Israelis not to be consumed by rage, and said the vast majority of Palestinians were not affiliated with Hamas. The Palestinian people are suffering as well, he said. He said he would ask Congress for an “unprecedented” aid package this week, and also unveiled more aid for Palestinian citizens.
Israel will allow Egypt to deliver limited quantities of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, the office of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said. The decision was approved in light of a request from the visiting US president, Joe Biden, a statement said. “Israel will not allow any humanitarian aid from its territory to the Gaza Strip as long as our hostages are not returned,” it said.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has condemned the attack on the hospital in Gaza as “senseless” and “horrifying”, while the EU’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell, reiterated the strong need for Europe to condemn Hamas, but also to condemn any attack on civilians by Israel in the defence of its country that breaches international humanitarian law.
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has described the deaths at the hospital in Gaza as “an unjustifiable tragedy”, and repeated his plea for an international humanitarian intervention and a ceasefire in defence of Israeli and Palestinian children.
The UK defence secretary, Grant Shapps, has said that misattributing responsibility for the hospital blast could “make things worse”, and the foreign secretary James Cleverly said in parliament “rushed, inaccurate reporting costs lives.”
The US has used its veto at the UN security council to block a resolution calling for Israel to allow humanitarian corridors into the Gaza Strip, a pause in the fighting and the lifting of an order for civilians to leave the north of the besieged enclave. The UK abstained.
Israeli forces shot dead two Palestinian teenagers near Ramallah in the West Bank on Wednesday after protests against Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials said.
Angry protests continued across the Middle East on Wednesday as thousands of people in different countries demonstrated amid growing anger over the blast at al-Ahli Arab hospital. A call by Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah movement for a “day of rage” followed protests in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia, Turkey, Morocco and Iran.
France’s prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, has said that the number of French citizens killed in the attacks by Hamas in Israel has risen to 24.
Egypt’s president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, said on Wednesday that Egyptians in their millions would reject the forced displacement of Palestinians into Sinai, adding that any such move would turn the peninsula into a base for attacks against Israel. He said “Egypt rejects any attempt to resolve the Palestinian issue by military means or through the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land, which would come at the expense of the countries of the region.”
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has said “antisemitism has no place in Germany” after an attack outside a synagogue in Berlin in which police say two molotov cocktails were thrown at the building.
Pope Francis on Wednesday deplored the “desperate” situation in Gaza as he urged the faithful to take “only one side” in the Israel-Hamas conflict – “the side of peace”.
