And for a closer look at what we do know
and what we don't about this blast,
I want to bring in CNN
military analyst, retired
Lieutenant General Mark Hertling here.
General, look,
we have some video
here, and I want you to
just take a look at this.
This is some footage that seems to show
a rocket going up here
and then something happens.
That's pretty catastrophic
when you see this.
What do you see?
I see a flame out of a rocket
and we've been talking about this
all day.
You know,
and it's a result of
what happened yesterday.
But when you see that rocket
going forward,
this happens a lot
with these kind of rocket
that are supplied by Iran.
It is a rocket motor that doesn't work.
It gets a certain distance
and then it just flamed out
and a rocket has a trajectory of a brick.
Once it doesn't have a force behind it,
so it immediately drops.
So you see it, right?
This is a slow motion there.
Video flame out. Yeah.
So it loses its rocket motor
and then it just drops down.
But what you also have
when that happens is the fuel.
That's part of the rocket
that hasn't burned.
So when it hits the ground,
we'll see next year
the explosion of an explosion
from a viewpoint from the ground.
Now, this isn't a very big piece
of ordnance.
It's a relatively small ordnance.
So the the
the actual explosive isn't that big.
But what is big
is the fuel that it hasn't used.
That caused a lot of cars
in that parking lot to burn.
We see the after effects of that.
We see a very small crater.
If it heads in a crater,
actually take a look
at what you're discussing here.
I'm going to just break this down
a little bit more for folks.
This what I'm showing you here,
this has to be clear,
provided by the IDF.
This shows
what looks like
satellite imagery of the area
where this rocket
may have come down.
Right. This is the explosion site.
They're saying that
if you look over here,
this is what typically you would see
if there was an IDF strike,
even as large
as 19 meters, a much larger crater.
It doesn't seem like we see that here.
And we also have some before
and after images here.
This is the hospital,
the Al-Ahly Hospital.
This is the explosion site
in this area here.
And here it is after.
So you were just discussing
the size of the crater.
We don't
some of the images are not super clear.
No. Whether there was a crater or not.
But when you look at this,
this is up close of the cars
and the side of the fire.
What do you see?
Well,
what I saw earlier
today was a photo of a very small crater
about right here, about right there.
What you see in this
area are a lot of burned cars.
What you see over here are cars
that are not burned.
What you see across at this building,
if you had a picture of the
building, which I think we do
know, I'm sorry,
we don't have an up
close of the building,
but we do have
what we do see
is pockmarks on the side of the building.
Look at this video here.
And it's well, and it will show up here.
You see the burning car.
But is the camera scans over here,
you'll see cars that aren't burned.
Yeah, very close.
So it had an effect of the explosive
capability of a rocket,
which is relatively small,
but a lot of fuel blowing up after it.
That didn't burn off the rocket motor.
So this is evidence of
certainly not a bomb
that would come off of an aircraft.
You see the pockmarks,
the blown out windows,
but not a whole lot else.
I mean, there's not
a whole lot of damages to the building.
Now, the doctors inside of the building
said that there were patients
that were injured
that could have been from the blast
glass flying inside of the building.
But it certainly wasn't
a strike on the hospital itself.
And just briefly,
if you were to have seen a strike,
a true strike coming from Israel,
I want to also,
just as I'm saying,
this show you, this is
an image that
shows, according to the IDF,
the trajectory of this rocket.
And it comes from somewhere
inside of northern Gaza and it goes
this direction across east.
What you have here is something
called a point of origin.
That's where the rocket was fired from.
Right. Where that red dot is.
You see multiple tracers
coming off of those.
Those are the different rockets
that come out of that rocket pod.
The one that came out right here
came out over the hospital. And I.
I believe that that was the one that lost
its engine
and fell on close to the hospital,
not on the hospital.
So this is part of the proof
that the Israeli Defense Forces gave.
They said, hey, here,
this is something called a QS 36 radar.
They use these radars
to connect with the Iron Dome
to shoot down rockets.
So when you see
all these coming off of a missile site
and one dropping
over the top of a hospital,
you can see where it was
truthfully,
an accident,
a missile that that didn't go through
to to its final mission. Yeah.
And as you pointed out
many times,
these are Iranian provided missiles.
They they tend to do that.
General Mark Hertling,
thank you very much
for breaking all of that down for us.
And President Biden
reflecting on the difficult decisions
ahead for Israel's leaders.
Here is part of what he said.
I made wartime decisions.
I know the choices
are never clear or easy
for the leadership.
There's always cost.
That requires being delivered.
It requires asking very hard questions.
It requires clarity about the objectives
and an honest assessment
about whether the path you're on
will achieve those objectives.
Now,
the vast
majority of Palestinians are not Hamas.
Hamas does not represent
the Palestinian people.
I want to bring in now
Aviv Ezra, a senior Israeli diplomat
at the New York
consulate and a former consul
general in Chicago.
Aviv, thank you for being here.
This incident has had
real ripple effects.
And putting aside for a moment
any dispute about who's responsible
and who's not.
We just broke that down.
Has it altered
Israel's plans
for a ground invasion of Gaza?
Well, the way we see it,
this is actually a triple war crime.
On the one
hand, they're sending missiles
from population areas into Gaza.
They're shooting at population,
innocent civilians in Israel.
And thirdly,
when they misfire,
they hit their own population
in the Gaza Strip.
So for us,
this is not only a triple war crime.
It is something that later on that
took a life of its own
into the conversation of who is in charge
and the fake news
that came out of it
with the attack on the station
last 24 hours ago
created a situation
where Israel was guilty
before we finish it.
But I'm sure you can imagine
that that is likely to happen here.
Does the fallout from this,
even if it's as a
result of misinformation,
change the calculus for Israel
as it tries to decide what happens
if there is a ground invasion
and whether that is
something that can be done
or should be done right now?
Well, for Israel,
it's pretty clear
that we have to make sure
that what happened in October
seven would not happen again.
Therefore, we want to make sure that we
extract the pricetag from the period
from Hamas's
the price
tag from the Israeli people
to the Palestinian people,
because they mourn really
the brunt of the burden. Correct.
So we want to differentiate
between the Palestinian people and Hamas.
And like the president said,
Hamas does not represent
the Palestinian people.
Hamas is a terror
organization, a vicious,
barbaric terrorist concession
that needs to pay a price.
And by the way,
when we talk about free Gaza,
I think they talk about
free Gaza from Hamas.
So we
we are doing everything we can
to make sure
to make that differentiation.
We open corridors, safe
corridors, to have the
innocent population go down south.
We invested for days.
We are waiting to make sure
that they make it, that we create safe
shelters over there.
We actually have,
on the other hand, Hamas
pushing them back into the war zone
by that, creating another world.
Do you understand
why there is so much distrust
in the Arab
world of
the information
coming from the IDF
and the narrative about
what happened in this hospital blast?
And how is Israel going to deal
with the fact that some of that distrust
comes from a real place?
Because there have been past incidents
in which the IDF has given
incorrect information?
Well, the IDF, I think, is
most of the time
that we are focused
on investigating and understanding
what happened. It takes time.
This is what happened this time around.
This is what happened in the past.
When we get it wrong, we try to fix it.
And sometimes we also
try to fix things that
that we have got wrong in the past.
I think credibility is crucial here.
We are
comparing between a
liberal democracy
with checks and balances
and a terror organization.
And I think at this time
it's black and white.
We have to, first of all, stand
by Israel, like the president said.
All right.
Ezra, thank you very much for joining us.
We appreciate it. Thank you so much.