President Joe Biden was asked by a reporter in Israel on Wednesday what made him confident that the Israelis weren’t behind the explosion that killed hundreds at a Gaza hospital on Tuesday.

Biden responded that it was “the data I was shown by my Defense Department.”

Two U.S. officials told ABC News the Pentagon independently concluded the Gaza hospital blast was likely caused by an errant Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short of its target.

  • Spzi@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Yes, that might be the case under the current circumstances. The above picture helped to imagine what 500 people look like crammed squarely in a space. I doubt the 500 hypothetical people resting in the parking lot were placed more tightly than that.

    Next, look at pictures of the detonation crater, which has the size of a sewer manhole. Imagine that explosion going off in the middle of the audience of 500 people. Would they all die from that? The sheer amount of body mass and flesh would shield the people in rows 20+ from the explosion.

    I bet you couldn’t kill 500 people with whatever exploded there, if you tied them directly onto the bomb, or rocket, or whatever. Is there any precedent of a terrorist attack or military strike or anything which killed that many people with a similarly small explosion?

    • blitzkrieg@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      You can’t imagine people running away from being bombed being more tightly packed than people attending a conference?

      • Spzi@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Ok, fair point. But still, the explosion only has finite power. Shock waves literally do have a kill limit. They cannot rip through waves and waves of human flesh and still come out deadly on the other side. At some point, the energy is absorbed, the fragments are absorbed.

        • blitzkrieg@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          At this point, no one is arguing about how many people died, people are arguing about who did it.

          Now, who has a rocket that can kill hundreds of humans, the Israeli army, one of the most powerful armies in the world, backed by the US, the most powerful army in the world, or Hamas, who make pitiful self-made rockets from metal pipes?

          • Spzi@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            no one is arguing about how many people died

            Oh, people are arguing about exactly that. We’re even in a subthread which is all about the number 500!

            You don’t get it. This is to show how ridiculous 500 people claim is.
            

            Now, who has a rocket that can kill hundreds of humans

            As far as I know, all evidence points to a palestinian device, including the small blast radius.

            And the claim that “hundreds of humans” were killed is most probably fake news.


            I’m not interested to go into further rabbit holes. This cannot be resolved in debate anyways. Future investigations might reveal what happened, we cannot do that here.

            • blitzkrieg@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Alright, this thread is arguing about how many people were killed. The rest of the world is arguing about who did it.

              But the western media and the president of the US are saying Hamas did it.

              This is the president of the same country that lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to invade them, and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians(In Iraq alone). And their response years later was “Sorry, my bad”.

              What makes you think they won’t lie about this? Or anything else?