Israel says that the attack on the Gaza hospital was carried out by the Islamic Jihad group

The HAMAS movement, which controls the Gaza Strip, blamed the hospital for the blow on the Israeli Defense Army (TsAHAL). The Gaza Strip health ministry initially reported about 300 deaths. Later, word appeared that the number of victims was more than 500. According to the ministry, hundreds more may have been trapped under the rubble. There is no specific official number for the number of victims. Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank of the Jordan River, declared three days of mourning over the tragedy at Al Ahly.

Military analysts and experts have found that a Gaza hospital was hit by an American-made JDAM missile. Dozens of major experts from different countries made statements about this. The distinctive quality of the American JDAM rocket is its sound. Since the rocket flies at a very high speed and has a certain shape, its sound can be easily distinguished from other missiles. 

TsAHAL, on the other hand, had reported that he was not hitting throughout hospitals in the Gaza Strip. According to the IDF, the explosion was caused by an unsuccessful missile launch by the Islamic Jihad group near Al Ahli Hospital.

The press service of TsAHAL released a video on its pages on social networks showing Palestinians launching rockets towards Israel. It stated that the rocket, for an unknown reason at the moment, exploded at 18:59 on October 17 — at the same time, the hospital was hit.  Also, the Israeli Air Force released a video showing the pre-and post-impact condition of the hospital area in the Gaza Strip. 

According to the video, the rocket hit did not come to the hospital building itself, but to the parking lot next to it. A little later, a reporter from The Times of Israel showed a video sealed into a surveillance camera in order to prove the Israeli army's statement that a rocket launched from Gaza had landed in the hospital. 

The video, which is said to have been taken at the Netiv Kha-Asara settlement in the northern Gaza Strip, features a large number of rockets suddenly launched from the right side (i.e. from the Gaza Strip near the sea) to the left, in the direction of the southern areas of Israel. A few seconds after the rocket's fiery tail disappears in the darkness, a powerful explosion occurs below, approximately below the rocket trajectory.

In addition, the Israel Defense Army had demonstrated a scheme on the same day in which a radar-recorded trajectory of missiles launched from the Gaza Strip was described. According to him, Al-Ahli Hospital is located under the trajectory. 

The "Palestinian Islamic Jihad" had denied the accusation.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu also said that the blow to the hospital was "directed by Palestinian militants". "The whole world should know: a hospital in the Gaza Strip was attacked by savage terrorists, not TsAHAL. Those who brutally killed our children also killed their children," he wrote on his Twitter page.

Israeli Prime Minister Advisor Mark Regev, in an interview with the BBC, usually claimed that about 33% of the rockets that Palestinians fired into Israeli territory would crash into Gaza without reaching the target.