Speaker 1: Well, it's a tragedy that this is where we are today.
But this is exactly the reason why I urged caution yesterday and said we should wait
before we say anything even remotely definitive about the bombing of a Gaza hospital that
took place on Monday.
We now are at a point where the best assessment, based on all of the video photographic and
osint intelligence that we have, is that Israel had nothing to do with the hospital bombing
that took place in Gaza and it was the result of apparently an errant rocket that was part
of a barrage of rockets being fired from Gaza into Israel.
Now, I'm going to go through this piece by piece.
Maybe do me the favor and do yourself the favor of waiting until I'm done before commenting
on YouTube or writing an email.
But this is exactly what I mean when I say that the propaganda war is an additional layer
on the actual war that is taking place here.
There are tons of people desperate to blame one side or the other, to be first, to be
titillating, just posting crazy things for which they have no evidence.
Streamers who know nothing more than I know about ordnance survey explosions making breathless
claims about this was definitely one thing or the other.
Well, we have the analysis, we have the video, we have the pictures, and we have the opinions
of intelligence experts saying this wasn't Israel.
We have Hamas saying it was Israel with no evidence to support that.
That's where we are right now.
Initially, as I told you, reports, were Israel deliberately bombed a Gaza hospital, 500 dead,
700 dead, 900 dead, and then suddenly Israel denies it.
Okay.
Well, alone, that's not much.
Israel has initially denied things that they ultimately acknowledged in the past.
That's not proof of anything.
Then there are reports.
But look, Israel did admit it and then deleted the tweet, except it wasn't actually anyone
with knowledge or involved with the administration.
It wasn't actually a valuable admission of any kind.
Suddenly there is an audio recording, but the audio recording is fake.
There's doubt.
Well, we now have a much bigger picture.
We have video that, according to experts on the matter, show rockets clearly coming from
Gaza to the hospital in Gaza.
The video is from the Israeli side, from the other side of the fence.
And you see the origin and the destination of the rockets and it's all on the Gazan side.
Joe Biden said during his visit yesterday to the Middle East that it all points to Israel
had nothing to do with this.
Speaker 2: Deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday.
And based on what I've seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team.
No idea.
But there's a lot of people out there, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: So we also have White House National Security Council spokesperson putting out
a statement saying, quote, 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.
Now, you could say, well, I don't trust Israel and I don't trust the United States.
I don't trust anyone.
All right.
Well, let's continue because it's absolutely reasonable to be skeptical until we have information,
by the way.
It makes perfect sense to be skeptical until we have more information.
Big picture.
None of us can personally verify the evidence.
None of us is going to Gaza to look at the evidence.
So we depend on others.
And when we depend on others, ideally we will depend on the most authoritative sources that
we can find.
Right now, we have democratic countries who, if they make a mistake or lie, are subject
to negative consequences, saying this wasn't Israel.
They've released information, radar, audio, video, internal assessments agree this was
not Israel.
On the other hand, you have a terrorist authoritarian group with no checks and balances and no consequences
for lying saying it was Israel.
And if you don't believe that, there's no consequences to lying.
There are still members of Congress who on Monday tweeted, Israel killed 500 people at
a Gaza hospital.
Now that it's abundantly clear that it wasn't Israel, they have not deleted their tweet.
Some of them have even doubled down.
We'll get to that.
Now, we always want to leave some caution.
More information could hypothetically come out that completely changes our assessment.
But right now, the reality is there's no evidence pointing to Israel.
Now, some will write in, I know, and will say, but David, there is not a Hamas.
Or Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that could kill 500 or 700 or 900 people.
So it couldn't have been one of those dinky rockets from PJ or Hamas.
Well, those numbers are very clearly false at this point in time.
We have pictures of the damage and it's quite small.
You don't have to believe me or trust me.
In fact, I encourage you not to.
Many of you have written to me and said, David, you know the guy who can be trusted on this,
it's Mehdi Hasan.
Mahdi is good on this issue.
Well, let's do that.
Matty posted to Twitter, quoting Marc Garlasco, a military adviser, who wrote, quote, Whatever
hit the hospital in Gaza, it wasn't an airstrike.
Even the smallest JDAM leaves a three meter crater.
Widespread surface damage and a total lack of cratering.
Is this inconsistent with an airstrike?
And METI endorses this and says Mark has worked for the Pentagon, for the U.N., for Human
Rights Watch, and knows his stuff on war crimes and airstrikes in all of the fog of war and
the fog of Twitter.
He's a credible and serious voice worth paying attention to.
At least I do.
So if you find Matty more trustworthy than I am on this, just look at what Matty says.
Matty also tweeting a report about the completely incorrect claims of 500 dead, 900 dead, quoting
BBC, quote, Based on available evidence, it appears the explosion happened in a courtyard,
which is part of the hospital site.
Images after the blast do not show significant damage to surrounding hospital buildings.
So the reason for the confusion, how could there be 500 dead if this was a Hamas rocket
or a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket?
It's because there appear to be no 500 dead, not even close.
Nowhere close.
Now, what's the takeaway here?
The takeaway is not Israel is completely blameless in this entire fiasco or any of it.
The takeaway is the destructive impact of this propaganda war, the consequences where
the cat is out of the bag, and you have everyone from members of Congress to the entire Arab
world still blaming Israel for something that pretty clearly Israel did not do.
People are protesting at the US embassy in Lebanon because Israel struck the hospital.
Except Israel didn't strike the hospital.
We have pictures not consistent with the story.
The small amount of damage the hospital not even directly hit.
None of it is consistent with the type of attack that on Monday half of the Internet
was attributing to Israel.
And the most the most insane thing about all of this is everyone's reaction would be thank
whoever, thank God, thank the light, thank the universe, thank all the thank Jesus.
500 people, 700 people, 900 people didn't really die.
That should be everyone's reaction to this.
But instead, the reaction is shifting the goalposts.
Well, the fact that we believed it could have been Israel means they're still just as bad,
even though maybe they didn't do it.
Guys, please.
Please.
American members of Congress, like Rashida Tlaib, tweeted Monday, Israel just bombed
the hospital, killing 500 Palestinians.
Just like that.
And she was wrong and she hasn't deleted it.
And when a reporter tried asking her about it, she walked away.
And then an event yesterday, she just repeated the claim, which we now know to be almost
certainly false.
People are still attacking me on Twitter for having waited.
And and now I believe that it indeed was not Israel.
And people are furious that I had the audacity to wait rather than to breathlessly go out
there and say X, Y, or Z.
You can still hate Israel or whatever, but say, Hey, I got this one wrong.
That would be a far more respectable thing to do.
And it's a really sad state of affairs.
Now, thankfully, most of my actual audience appreciates the fact that I waited and that
yesterday I said, Hey, right now we just don't know.
And today I can come to you and say, Now we do know.
One other note.
There is a disturbing overlap happening between anti-Israeli left wing accounts and anti-Semitic
far right accounts.
It's really disturbing to witness.
There are far right accounts that are just overtly anti-Semitic.
They just hate Jews.
They are using this moment and this layer of propaganda to rebrand themselves almost
as if they are pro-Palestinian.
Of course they're not.
But it's helping them.
Okay.
And there are.
It's like a Venn diagram.
And there is an overlap in the middle between the anti-Semitic right and the anti-Israeli
left.
That is really disturbing.
And I think most of my audience is not falling into that.
So this is the propaganda war we've been talking about.
We now have an incredible amount of information about this.
And my belief is that the vast majority of my audience appreciates waiting to get it
right rather than being first and wrong.
Let me know if you would have rather me be first
and wrong.