Members of Congress are pushing for the White House to declassify the information that led to the conclusion that Israel was not responsible for a deadly explosion at a Gaza hospital earlier this week. The call comes after a Wednesday intelligence briefing in the US Senate provided evidence that lawmakers believe could combat “public misinformation” about the blast.
Wednesday’s classified briefing by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence presented Senators with all available information about the bombing of the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. A similar session was held for ranking bipartisan members of both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. During both meetings, members of Congress affirmed the intelligence community’s assessment that a stray Palestinian rocket, not an Israeli airstrike, was responsible for the explosion that killed an unknown number of people on Tuesday.
“I think it is very important that the intelligence community and others lean forward as much as possible to bring that evidence to light, since there are clearly protests not only in the West Bank but around the world,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) told reporters after the briefing. “This is being debated in the press around the world and clearly there are some press outlets that are not friendly to the United States, not friendly at all to Israel, that may be simply not showing or telling the full story.”
This call was echoed across the aisle by North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, who urged the Biden administration to be “forthcoming” with “pictures charts, and graphs” so that the public can see the “information that led the president to take the position he did.”
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As Valuetainment previously reported, protests erupted across the Middle East on Tuesday night following a deadly explosion at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, with Israeli and Palestinian authorities blaming one another for the attack.
The Hamas-affiliated Gaza Health Ministry claimed the blast resulted from an airstrike and reported the death toll at more than 500, then adjusted that count to 471. The Israel Defense Force claimed that a missile fired by members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad had malfunctioned and landed on hospital grounds.
Additional video of the area purportedly showed that the hospital had not even been hit, but rather an adjacent parking lot. US Intelligence sources suggest that the true death toll is “at the low end of the 100-to-300 spectrum,” and European sources suggest that that number may even be between 10 and 50.
US President Joe Biden affirmed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the destruction had been caused “by the other team” on Wednesday. However, as public opinion solidified on both sides, American media outlets and members of Congress—including Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar—doubled down on blaming Israel.
“Unfortunately, the narratives have already spread and solidified at this point,” one US intelligence official said.
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