Report: Possibly 50 Were Killed at Gaza Hospital, not 500

The Agence Frence-Presse (AFP) news service reports that a European intelligence source believes that there were a maximum of 50 people killed at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, not 500 as Hamas claimed (and as the media repeated at the time).

As Breitbart News reported, the explosion Tuesday night at the hospital turned out to be caused by an errant Palestinian rocket, not an Israeli airstrike, and the rocket hit the parking lot of the hospital, not the building itself, though there were casualties.

Watch – Media Repeat Hamas Propaganda on Hospital Blast; Israel Shows Evidence Terrorist Rocket Responsible

Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart News

Now, the AFP reports (via Times of Israel), the initial figure of 500 dead — arrived at suspiciously quickly — may have been off by a factor of ten:

A senior European intelligence source tells AFP that he believes a maximum of 50 people were killed in the blast at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza on Tuesday.

…

IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus also disputed the Hamas-run ministry’s figures, asking, “Where are all the bodies?”

…

AFP correspondents saw dozens of bodies at the scene, with medics and civilians recovering bodies wrapped in white cloth, blankets or black plastic bags. Images of the hospital after the strike published by the Maxar satellite monitoring group show the hospital buildings mainly appeared to be intact.

The U.S. has concluded that Israel was not responsible, though U.S. intelligence assessments put the possible number of casualties higher, at somewhere between 100 and 300.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.