RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli warplanes struck targets across Gaza overnight and into Sunday, as well as two airports in Syria and a mosque in the occupied West Bank allegedly used by militants, as the 2-week-old war with Hamas threatened to spiral into a broader conflict.Israel has traded fire with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group on a near-daily basis since the war began, and tensions are soaring in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Israeli forces have battled militants in refugee camps and carried out two airstrikes in recent days.
For days, Israel has seemed to be on the verge of launching a ground offensive in Gaza as part of its response to Hamas’ deadly Oct. 7 rampage. Tanks and tens of thousands of troops have massed at the border, and Israeli leaders have spoken of an undefined next stage in operations.
A convoy of 17 aid trucks was allowed to enter Gaza from Egypt on Sunday, Egypt’s state-run media reported, the second shipment into the territory since Israel imposed a complete siege two weeks ago. On Saturday, 20 trucks entered.
Relief workers said far more was needed to address the spiraling humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where half the territory’s 2.3 million people have fled their homes. The U.N. humanitarian agency, known as OCHA, said Saturday’s convoy carried about 4% of an average day’s imports before the war and “a fraction of what is needed after 13 days of complete siege.”
The Israeli military said the humanitarian situation was “under control,” as OCHA called for 100 trucks a day to enter.
Israel repeated its calls for people to leave northern Gaza, including by dropping leaflets from the air. It says an estimated 700,000 have already fled, but hundreds of thousands remain. That would raise the risk of mass civilian casualties in any ground offensive.
Israeli military officials say Hamas’ infrastructure and underground tunnel system are concentrated in Gaza City, in the north, and that the next stage of the offensive will include unprecedented force there. Israel says it wants to crush Hamas, but officials have also spoken of carving out a possible buffer zone to keep Palestinians from approaching the border.
Hospitals packed with patients and displaced people are running low on medical supplies and fuel for generators, forcing doctors to perform surgeries with sewing needles, using vinegar as disinfectant, and without anesthesia.
The World Health Organization says at least 130 premature babies are at “grave risk” because of a shortage of generator fuel. It said seven hospitals in northern Gaza have been forced to shut down due to damage from strikes, lack of power and supplies, or Israeli evacuation order
Khalil al-Degran, a hospital official, said more than 90 bodies had been brought in since early Sunday, as the sound of nearby bombing echoed behind him. He said 180 wounded people had arrived, mostly children, women and the elderly who had been displaced from other areas.
Israel’s military has said it is striking Hamas members and installations, but does not target civilians. Palestinian militants have fired over 7,000 rockets at Israel, according to the military, and Hamas says it targeted Tel Aviv early Sunday.
The military says it plans to step up airstrikes ahead of the “next stages of the war,” without elaborating.
More than 1,400 people in Israel have been killed in the war — mostly civilians slain during the initial Hamas attack. At least 212 people were captured and dragged back to Gaza, including men, women, children and older adults. Two Americans were released on Friday in what Hamas said was a humanitarian gesture.
More than 4,300 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry. That includes the disputed toll from a hospital explosion.
Syrian state media meanwhile reported that Israeli airstrikes have targeted the international airports in the capital, Damascus, and the northern city of Aleppo. It said the strikes killed one person and damaged the runways, putting them out of service.
Israel has carried out several strikes in Syria, including on the airports, since the war began. Israel rarely acknowledges individual strikes, but says it acts to prevent Hezbollah and other militant groups from bringing in arms from their patron, Iran, which also supports Hamas.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah said six of its fighters were killed Saturday, and the group’s deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Kassem, warned that Israel would pay a high price if it starts a ground offensive in Gaza. Israel struck Hezbollah targets Sunday in response to rocket fire, the military said.
Israel also announced evacuation plans for another 14 communities near the Lebanon border. Kiryat Shmona’s 20,000 people were told to evacuate last week.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, 90 Palestinians have been killed in clashes with Israeli troops, arrest raids and attacks by Jewish settlers since the Hamas attacks, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Israeli forces have closed crossings into the territory and checkpoints between cities, measures they say are aimed at preventing attacks. Israel says it has arrested more than 700 Palestinians since Oct. 7, including 480 suspected Hamas members.
Israeli forces killed at least five people there early Sunday, according to the Health Ministry. Two were killed in an airstrike on a mosque in the town of Jenin, which has seen heavy gunbattles over the past year.
The Israeli military said the mosque compound belonged to Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants who had carried out several attacks in recent months and were planning another one.
If a tree falls in a forest, and no reporter is there to witness it, the first task for the seeker of truth is to establish: Did the tree even fall down at all?
On Tuesday, most international news outlets — and, by extension, most news consumers — were reasonably convinced that a hospital in Gaza had just been destroyed in an explosion, killing many of its patients.
Most were also reasonably convinced that Israel was responsible, its denials duly reported but with the knowledge that only one party to the conflict had the firepower and means to deliver such destruction, along with a record of targeting such facilities in the past.
"Israel's bombing of the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza killed 500 civilians," declared an emergency alert from Genocide Watch, a group that tracks ethnic cleansing and campaigns of mass murder (and which has accused Hamas and the Israeli government of engaging in both, to varying degrees). "The hospital bombing was a clear war crime."
By Wednesday, what became clear was that, while narrowly accurate, the most truthful part of Tuesday's reporting was the attribution: that a hospital was destroyed and hundreds of people killed, according to Hamas, a terrorist organization that controls the Gaza Strip and its various ministries, including the one that reports the Palestinian death toll.
The photos that emerged in daylight, of a hospital intact and a parking lot with a crater far too small to be from an Israeli airstrike, called into question everything that most reporters and their readers had taken for granted — and lent credence to the earlier, adamant denials from the Israel Defense Forces. A senior European intelligence official also said the actual death toll was likely between 10 and 50 people, while an initial US assessment placed the number at the "low end of the 100-to-300 spectrum."
There is good reason not to trust the IDF. Last year, in just one example, the Israeli military killed an American journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, who was reporting outside the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, initially claiming she was surrounded by armed militants and potentially killed by Palestinian gunmen. But video and eyewitness testimony contradicted both claims. Evidence suggested that Israeli troops were the ones who opened fire and that they deliberately targeted the journalists.
What also emerged on Thursday, however, was a possibility that some could not process: One, that the IDF was telling the truth, this time, when it blamed the explosion near the Ahli Arab Hospital on a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad; and two, that the international media had actually challenged the assertions of Israel, a Western ally, and in this case deferred to the claims of Hamas authorities in Gaza.
"Just imagine the headlines if Putin had bombed a hospital in Kharkiv, killing 500 people, many of them kids, and then blamed it on the Ukrainians," Yanis Vaourfakis, a leftist economist and Greek politician, posted on social media. "Nothing makes Vlad happier than watching the West's touching attempts to overtake his callous cynicism."
Russia has bombed hospitals in Ukraine, as well as Syria, and its denials have been viewed as dubious for a simple reason: If something falls from the sky and explodes, it is generally right to suspect the party with air supremacy. And that is what happened Tuesday, Israeli claims treated with a similar, earned skepticism — even before the bombing of a hospital was an established fact.
The knee-jerk response also went the other way. Before the IDF issued a denial, Hananya Naftali, a right-wing Israeli influencer, assumed Israel was responsible — and immediately attempted to justify it: A "Hamas terrorist based inside a hospital" had been attacked, he posted on social media, killing a "number of terrorists." In this, he was indeed no different than commentators who have excused Russia's atrocities: projecting absolute certainty that whatever happened, despite the little we know, was for a damn good reason.
Many, then, were embarrassed by what is objectively good albeit startling news: that a hospital in Gaza, reported as leveled, was still standing — and not bombed by the IDF at all. That's a conclusion backed by US intelligence and supported by independent analysts, including a former UN war crimes investigator and researchers at Bellingcat, who noted that the damage seen in photographs shared the next morning was not consistent with the area being struck in an Israeli airstrike.
A French intelligence assessment, made public Friday, also rejected claims of "an Israeli strike," saying there was "nothing to indicate" the hospital was hit by the IDF this week. "The most probable hypothesis is that a Palestinian rocket exploded with a charge of about five kilos," it said.
The Associated Press, too, concluded — after an analysis of video and input from "experts with specialties in open-source intelligence, geolocation and rocketry" — that the most likely cause of the blast near the hospital was a misfired rocket, not an Israeli strike.
Members of the media (and others) have lessons to learn here.
First, the fog of war, paired with social media, is a recipe for inaccuracy. We should all slow down and be more inclined to let the fog lift before broadcasting an unverified claim. While some may see this week's reporting as the product of an anti-Israel bias, the truth is likely more mundane: No news outlet wants to be the last one to cover the most important story of the day.
Second, while the IDF's statements should continue to be viewed with healthy skepticism, the official sources in Gaza clearly warrant at least as much scrutiny, controlled as they are by a designated terrorist organization. Hamas has an incentive to blame anything bad that happens in Gaza on the Israeli state and has shown itself willing to fabricate a war crime — claiming a hospital found standing on Wednesday was destroyed the night before. If it wasn't absolutely clear before, it is today: The local health ministry, which rushed out a now seemingly implausible body count, answers to this extremist group.
Acknowledging this is not to deny that Palestinians are suffering under Israeli bombardment. People on the ground, with no connection to Hamas, can attest to this, and the IDF would only dispute who is ultimately to blame. That points to the last lesson from all this for partisans of either side and other news consumers: What happens in war will not always reaffirm our prior convictions. Assumptions should always be questioned, and truths acknowledged — convenient or not.
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