This Tuesday, October 17 in Gaza, as it has every day since the war between Hamas and Israel began, Al Jazeera filmed the rooftops of Gaza live for its viewers. Onscreen, the TV channel's news banner showed that it was 6:59 pm local time when a light rose into the sky before disappearing into a flash. Eight seconds later, a new flash could be seen, this time on the ground. An explosion soon sounded at the Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza.

Hamas quickly accused the Israeli army of bombing the hospital. According to them, 471 people were killed in the explosion. IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari denied that the blast came from an Israeli air strike, and instead blamed the damage on "an Islamic Jihad rocket that misfired." Israel blamed a Palestinian rocket and questioned the number of casualties, which they claim was much lower than those announced by Hamas authorities.

Le Monde has authenticated and analyzed a dozen photos and videos of the blast. While these images cannot be used to ascertain the origin of the explosion, they do provide a number of contextual elements, such as the probable trajectory of the projectile, the presence of rockets fired from Gaza in the moments preceding the explosion, and the kind of damage that was caused.

Projectile follows a trajectory from south to north

Located 1.4 kilometers northwest of the hospital, in the heart of Gaza, the Al Jazeera camera captured everything that happened to the east of the city. The images showed a projectile advancing from the right to the left of the screen. It bellowed, then exploded in the sky. The images did not follow the trajectories of any debris that may have hit the ground.

The camera then zoomed out and moved downward. Five seconds after the first explosion, another occurred on the ground. Three seconds later, a third, much larger explosion could be seen. Le Monde has been able to confirm that the third explosion took place inside the Al Ahli Arab Hospital, which can be identified by several buildings. Al Jazeera station reported the time as 6:59 pm local time.

Other images show a salvo of rockets before the explosion

Israeli channel N12 also claimed to have obtained images of the moment the hospital was hit by an explosion, taken by a surveillance camera in Netivot, Israel, ten kilometers from the border. Le Monde pinpointed the camera's position, at the north-eastern end of the town. From there, it recorded everything that happened on the Gaza side, to the west.

In the video, you can see a series of lights rising into the sky, which was a salvo of projectiles, before they headed toward the right of the screen. One of these projectiles suddenly plunged to the ground. The time was shown as 6:59 pm and 20 seconds, corresponding to Al Jazeera's given time. By cross-referencing the fields of the two cameras, Le Monde can confirm that the projectiles followed a south-to-north trajectory.

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