U.S. President Joe Biden landed Wednesday in Israel and told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the attack Tuesday night on the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, in which hundreds are feared dead, it appears to have been carried out by the “other team, not you.”
“Based on what I have seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,” Biden said. “But there’s a lot of people out there who are not sure. So we’ve got to overcome a lot of things.”
Biden said that he’s “deeply saddened and outraged by the incident,” adding “the U.S. will continue to support Israel.” He did not provide evidence for his remarks that the deadly explosion might have been caused by Palestinian militants.
The U.S. has thrown its full support behind Israel since Hamas launched its violent attack on October 7, triggering massive Israeli retaliation. Washington has sent two aircraft carriers to the region in order to deter other actors from entering the war.
“I’m looking forward to having a discussion about what happens from here,” Biden told Netanyahu.
Netanyahu said “the civilized world must unite to defeat Hamas” and added “we will defeat Hamas and remove this terrible threat from our lives.”
Asked later by reporters what made him believe Israel was not behind the hospital explosion, Biden replied: “The data I was shown by my defense department.”
A White House National Security Council spokesperson added later Wednesday afternoon: “While we continue to collect information, our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday.”
Blame game
Hundreds are feared to have been killed in an attack on the al-Ahli hospital in the north of the Gaza Strip where patients, health care workers and internally displaced people were sheltering.
The information war around the hospital explosion has also heated up in the hours since the attack. Hamas swiftly blamed the attack on an Israeli air strike but the Israeli military denied it was responsible and said the hospital was hit by a rocket misfired by the Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad.
Speaking in the Egyptian capital Cairo earlier Wednesday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for a “thorough investigation” into the attack on the hospital, saying “we still do not know exactly what happened.”
The catastrophic explosion comes as the war between Israel and Hamas ramps up, more than a week after militants from the Palestinian group stormed out of the Gaza Strip and killed more than a thousand Israelis in a violent attack.
Israel has since hit back by conducting a siege of Gaza, rocking the region with continual air strikes and killing more than 3,000 Palestinians, according to authorities in Gaza.
This story has been updated.
