Strike on a hospital in Gaza: for Mathilde Panot, Israel’s responsibility is the “most credible” hypothesis

2023-10-19 16:11:12

At a time when the first elements confirm the hypothesis of the responsibility of Islamic Jihad in the strike which hit a hospital in the center of Gaza, LFI deputy Mathilde Panot made it known that, for her, the version according to which the he Israeli army was behind the shot which ended its course on the infrastructure of the Ahli Arab hospital was “the most credible”.

The elected official put forward two arguments in her demonstration, on France Inter this Thursday morning. First, “the Israeli government has already lied several times and in wars, generally, armies lie,” she judged. “There is an information war, that’s obvious.” Then, she recalled that, according to figures from the World Health Organization, since the start of the siege of the Gaza Strip – which followed the bloody incursion of Hamas into Israel on October 7 – “111 infrastructures medical facilities were targeted, 12 healthcare executives killed, 60 ambulances targeted” in the Israeli bombings.

France remains cautious

Since Tuesday evening, all parties have blamed each other for the explosion which affected the hospital infrastructure. Hamas quickly accused the Jewish state. The Israeli army, for its part, immediately claimed to have proof that the strike was due to a “failed rocket attack” by Islamic jihad. She presented them at a press conference on Wednesday.

According to officials cited Wednesday by le New York Times, the United States has footage indicating that the shot came from Palestinian fighters in Gaza. Upon his arrival in Tel Aviv, Joe Biden also made it known that, according to the information in his possession, the strike was not the responsibility of Israel but “of the opposing party”.

For the moment, France remains cautious. Paris “does not have its own data (…). We are waiting to have more information to be able to speak with certainty about the origin of the shot,” argued government spokesperson Olivier Véran on Wednesday. But a source from the European intelligence services estimated on Tuesday that the tragedy had left “a few dozen dead, probably between 10 and 50”, very far from the toll announced by Hamas, also estimating that “Israel probably did not did that”, according to the “serious leads” of intelligence available to his services.