The deadly explosion at Gaza’s al Ahli hospital remains shrouded in uncertainty, as Israeli and Hamas officials continue to blame each other for the blast.
Gaza’s health ministry says at least 471 people lost their lives in the incident on Tuesday evening – which would make it the deadliest incident in the territory since 2008.
Hamas say it was caused by an Israeli airstrike, but the Israel Defence Forces and US intelligence say it was a rocket misfired by Hamas ally Palestinian Islamic Jihad that struck the hospital. The militant group has denied this.
Much about what happened remains unclear, with competing narratives, pictures and videos circulated by either side claiming to support the opposing positions of both Israel and Hamas.
However, analysts have told Sky News that initial damage assessments “do not reflect what we would expect to see from an Israeli airstrike”.
Sky News has analysed videos, pictures and social media evidence to clarify what we know about the incident.
Projectiles in the sky
The al Alhi al Arabi hospital is in Gaza City, the densely populated capital of Gaza which the Israel Defence Forces has warned Palestinians to evacuate.
Some of the earliest visual evidence we found of the blast comes from a live broadcast stream operated by the news outlet Al Jazeera in the city centre.
At 6.59pm local time, the feed shows what appears to be a single projectile flying through the sky.
It’s after nightfall, which makes it difficult to identify exactly where the object has been fired from.
The camera tracks the path of the missile for around 13 seconds before it explodes in the sky, though it’s not immediately obvious from the footage why this might be.
The object then stops being visible on the stream, and seconds later a large flash can be seen below the camera’s line of vision.
When the camera pans down, it shows a separate large explosion at the hospital grounds – which is just under a mile away from the camera’s position, according to Sky News’ geolocation.
But the Al Jazeera feed is not the only visual evidence we found depicting the blast. Two cameras positioned across the border in Israel also captured the incident – one from the north and the other east of the Gaza Strip.
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