None of the explanations provided by Hamas and the Government of Israel allow us to definitively clarify who they are. those responsible for Tuesday’s massacre at Al-Alhi hospital, located in the center of Gaza City. The evidence provided by Israeli intelligence, which attributes the massacre to the launching of a rocket fired by Islamic Jihad that deviated from its trajectory They are as under suspicion as those that Hamas has spread, which blame Israel. Not even the belief of Joe Biden That the Islamists were responsible breaks the logic of the explanations given by the interested party: each side strives to blame the adversaryand the president of the United States does not escape this distribution of roles, in his case in support of Israel.
Unless one day an independent international commission can shed light on the case, which is unlikely, not even experts without direct interests agree to defend in battle. For some, only Israel has missiles with sufficient power to cause damage of the dimensions of that caused on Tuesday; for others, a rocket, not a missile, from Islamic Jihad could cause such carnage only if hitting the hospital set off a chain reaction in one of the many tunnels that undermine Gaza where weapons and explosives are kept. There are even those who believe that Israeli weapons are too sophisticated to fall into the hospital by mistakethus ruling out human error.
The only certainty is that the episode has raised spirits even among the Arab rulers most inclined to the pact, who have chosen to abstain from attending the meeting with Biden, and the demonstrations and riots in the Muslim world they have momentarily handed over the streets to the more radical factionswhich to a large extent they already had since the war broke out.
It was to be expected that such a thing would happen even without the hospital tragedy, but the president’s decision Abdel Fattá al Sisi, King Abdullah and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas not to meet with the president of the United States certifies that the periphery of Israel is not willing, for the moment, to align itself with the approach that the White House gives to the crisis. And that the European Union imitated at first, although it later rectified.
In the midst of the moral degradation that every war entails, it seems particularly difficult that after what has been experienced since October 7, and in particular two days ago, there is any room for the possibility that the international community, sooner rather than later, can carry out a ceasefire. The statements of Binyamin Netanyahu announcing that the war will be longthe United States’ unreserved support for Israel, and Hamas’s willingness to dispute the ground with the Israeli generals street by streeteven more so after the bombing of the hospital, justify the worst omens.
The most of 1,400 Israeli dead and more than 3,000 Palestinians They would more than justify giving common sense a chance, but the lines of fracture in the Middle East and the depth of the gap opened between the Arab street and the West are too visible for the almost 500 deaths in the hospital to be a determining argument to stop the carnage.