The emotion of the story moves the masses; the truth does not

Hamas boasts of having achieved a "decisive victory" in the narrative of the "bombing" and "massacre" of Al Ahli hospital, the oldest hospital in the Gaza Strip. The day after the event, in which this tragedy has been the focus of global media attention, marks an undoubted turning point, which will most likely change the tactical plans of both sides.  

The event occurred at 19:00 local time on Tuesday 17 October. A violent explosion rocked the building, which at the time housed some 2,000 Gazan citizens, as, in addition to the half thousand patients, another 1,500 citizens had sought refuge in the hospital, fleeing Israel's bombardment of a thousand or so targets. It has become a cliché that Hamas often places its rocket launching ramps in civilian buildings, including schools and medical centres, which serve as a shield against Israeli attacks.  

In the specific case of the Al Ahli Baptist hospital, as soon as the explosion occurred, the Gaza Ministry of Health, controlled like other institutions in the Strip by Hamas, immediately denounced the "massacre" of 500 people by "an Israeli missile", information that was instantly echoed by the Qatari channel Al Jazeera, followed by all the media, which then went on to analyse the consequences of the event.  

The rapid dissemination of the news, illustrated with images showing only the explosion and the resulting flares, punctuated with other images showing the destruction of previous bombings, and above all with messages and statements insisting on the "massacre caused by Israel", provoked a chain reaction of dozens of demonstrations of repulsion in many Arab capitals, as well as the first incidents in several European countries, which led Germany, France, Belgium, Italy and Spain to raise and reinforce their levels of preventive security.  

It took two hours for Israel's information and intelligence services to offer their first version of events: a video showing how an unsuccessful shot from Gaza itself, attributed to Islamic Jihad, was the cause of the disaster. Shortly afterwards, new evidence cascaded, the most eloquent being an intercepted conversation between two Hamas commanders, in which they acknowledged that the projectile was not Israeli and that "it had been a mistake".  

By then, the top leaders of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, who were due to meet the next day in Amman with US President Joe Biden, had already cancelled the meeting, while pressure and protests in the Arab, European and American streets had become widespread.  

Israel expanded its analysis by explaining that the rocket launched by Islamic Jihad had been intercepted by the Iron Dome defence system, and that the remains of the missile, with its corresponding explosive charge intact, fell on the hospital, causing the gigantic explosion on impact. His interpretation argued that, had it been a missile launched specifically at the hospital, a crater would have been created and the surrounding buildings would have been destroyed by the resulting brutal blast wave. However, no traces of the crater seem to have been found, and most of the destruction consists of about thirty cars parked in the hospital car park.  

Nor does there seem to be any evidence of the large number of casualties reported by Hamas, which the following day spoke of "at least 471 dead", but extended to the entire Strip the casualties recorded throughout the day.  

In the various conference calls I have taken part in, with different spokespersons from all sides, apart from reaffirming their respective accounts, there has been no change in the substance of the events that took place. However, the flood of messages and statements on X, the old Twitter, has created a huge chaos of misinformation. A good part of the blame must be laid at the door of the network's owner, Elon Musk, who decided to open up the verification key to other open sources, previously reserved exclusively for journalists and fully identified relevant personalities, so that the most extremist opinions have multiplied exponentially to infinity.  

All this has significantly blurred the origin of the current war: the attack and assault on several Israeli towns and kibbutzim bordering Gaza, with the murder of hundreds of Israeli citizens and the kidnapping of at least 199 people, many of them foreigners, who have not yet been returned to their families. The explosion at Al Ahli hospital, then, has accentuated the narrative of the victimisation of the Palestinian people, abducted into such a narrative by Hamas with virtually no nuances and with few exceptions, such as this newspaper, that distinguish between the Hamas terrorist organisation and the Palestinian people who suffer from it, while Israel is increasingly being singled out and blamed as the cause of the tragedy.