Several dozen people lost their lives in a Tuesday blast outside of a Gaza City hospital, not nearly 500 as Hamas had claimed, a spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Wednesday.
The clarification came after Israel and the US said that preliminary evidence suggested the explosion was sparked by a Hamas rocket misfire, which the militant group blamed on Israel and inflated the death toll to inflame tensions in the war-torn region.
“The explosion at the Al-Hali Hospital in Gaza is a human tragedy in which several dozen people were apparently killed,” Lior Haiat posted on X.
“This is also a Palestinian tragedy, where we see again the Palestinian terrorist organizations murdering their own people, after they cynically use them as human shields,” Haiat said.
The foreign affairs official then went on to lambaste media outlets that went with the terror organization’s version of events, directly calling out The New York Times with a screenshot of its headline that said, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.”
“Dozens of international media outlets, including leading and important ones, abandoned basic journalistic ethics and published incorrect, misleading and false information originating from a campaign planned by the terrorist organization Hamas,” Haiat said.
The claims of a drastically lowered death toll at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital were consistent with government and independent analysis that showed there was no structural damage to the facility or large cratering in its parking lot where the impact was centered.
Blake Spendley, an open-source intelligence analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, a Virginia think tank, told The Wall Street Journal Wednesday that he estimated a more realistic death toll from the blast would be about 50, rather than 500.
The Gaza Health Ministry, which is controlled by Hamas, had said 471 people were killed in the explosion.
The hospital has only 80 beds but was far past its capacity, crammed with Palestinians injured in ongoing Israeli airstrikes and evacuees seeking refuge amid the ongoing humanitarian crisis.