U.S. President Joe Biden pauses during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the war between Israel and Hamas, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023.
| Photo Credit: AP
The White House said Wednesday that a current intelligence assessment shows Israel was “not responsible” for the explosion at a Gaza hospital, but that information was still being collected.
The assessment is “based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said Wednesday in a social media post, following President Joe Biden’s comment to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that “based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you.”
There have been conflicting claims of who was responsible for the hospital blast. Officials in Gaza quickly blamed an Israeli airstrike. Israel denied it was involved and released a flurry of video, audio and other information that it said showed the blast was instead due to a missile misfire by Islamic Jihad, another militant group operating in Gaza. The Islamic Jihad dismissed that claim.
The Associated Press has not independently verified any of the claims or evidence released by the parties.
Mr. Biden said there were “a lot of people out there” who weren’t sure what caused the blast, which sparked protests throughout the Middle East. He later said he made the assertion based off “data from my Defense Department.”