The source of the blast was immediately a point of contestation. Israeli officials suggested that a failed rocket launch by Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) was responsible for the explosion, while Palestinian authorities blamed an Israeli airstrike.

Israeli military officials published false information soon after the blast, incorrectly identifying a video of a rocket being intercepted outside Gaza by their own missile defence system, far from the hospital, as a munition fired by Palestinian militants, which they claimed had disintegrated over the hospital, causing the blast. Since we (among others) debunked this claim, Israel has still not provided any conclusive evidence to support its claim that the deadly blast at al-Ahli Hospital was caused by a rocket fired by Hamas or PIJ.

Four days before the explosion, on 13 October, Israel had ordered the evacuation of all hospitals in northern Gaza, including al-Ahli. The following day, an artillery strike on the hospital’s cancer treatment ward was understood by staff to be a warning. Our wider research has identified a four-phase process by which hospitals in Gaza have been forced out of service by the Israeli military since October 2023, which commonly involves ‘intimidation’ or ‘warning’ strikes on areas immediately surrounding hospitals.

Based on videos and photographs recorded in the aftermath of the attack, we constructed a digital model of the hospital, and conducted a spatial analysis of features of the blast, including the crater and impact marks.