I think it's fair to say that neither side should be trusted at face value. The IDF refusing to allow an independent ballistics investigation was shameful and I'll openly say that.
Or Hamas for that matter. After the hospital was blown up, a cease fire should have started. Now it's just going to escalate and escalate. US is already saying we'll get involved if Hezbollah makes a move. It's like WW1 all over again.
I find it difficult to believe that the area isn’t so blanketed in various radar signals that they don’t have pretty exact tracking on what happened. Counterbattery radar has been a thing for decades now.
I get the intel sources and methods thing, but I can’t understand why Israel wouldn’t go farther than just making a statement to the press, given the optics on this.
Anything that they release will just be dismissed as fake by people who have already made up their minds
They've said they weren't conducting operations there. They released radio intercepts of Hamas fighters describing it as a misfire. Photographs of the site look nothing like the blast site of Israel's bombs. We know there was a volley of rockets launched around the same time. We have video of one apparently malfunctioning in the air shortly before a ground explosion. We know that Gazan rockets routinely misfire and cause civilian casualties.
Meanwhile, Hamas supplied no evidence, and said that they'd essentially flattened a hospital with a bomb killing 500. In reality, there was a small explosion in a parking lot, the hospital is still standing, and it seems to have been perhaps a few dozen causalities. Shockingly, the terrorist group seems to have little journalistic integrity.
I think it'll take longer for us to get definitive proof, but the evidence we have points pretty much in one direction.
Also, if Israel really had wanted to destroy the hospital, it wouldn't still be standing. You can't really reconcile Israel is a monster that destroys hospitals for no reason with the fact that all we can see is a scorched parking lot.
I'm not going to go full conspiracy theorist because ultimately I gain nothing from that, but given the track record of the US and Israel I have absolutely no faith in either side's report on this.
Same. No assessment done by either of the countries in this issue can be called 'independent' or 'neutral'. And there have been many instances of Israel bombing civilian and aid buildings in the past.