WATCH: Who is Responsible for Gaza Hospital Strike? Here’s What We Know – News18

A deadly strike on a Gaza hospital compound on Tuesday, which health officials said killed at least 500 people, has provoked global outrage and condemnation. The Israeli army quickly issued a statement, stating that the attack on the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in central Gaza was a rocket misfired by Islamic Jihad Palestinian militants.

“The hospital was hit as a result of a failed rocket launched by the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization,” it said in a statement. Meanwhile, Islamic Jihad, the Gaza-based militant group that claims to be fighting Israel alongside Hamas, described as “lies” the Israel army’s accusations that it was responsible for a strike on a Gaza hospital that left hundreds dead.

Less than two weeks into a war between Israel and Gaza-based Hamas militants who attacked southern Israel on October 7. According to the Israeli army, “intelligence from multiple sources we have… indicates that Islamic Jihad is responsible for the failed rocket launch which hit the hospital in Gaza.”

Spokesman Daniel Hagari told a press briefing that at the time of the strike, the Israeli army was not conducting air operations near the hospital and the rockets that hit the building did not match theirs. He added that the army would also provide conversations in Arabic that indicate the strike was done by Islamic Jihad.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu charged in a statement that “it was barbaric terrorists in Gaza that attacked the hospital in Gaza, and not the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). “The entire world should know: It was barbaric terrorists in Gaza that attacked the hospital in Gaza, and not the IDF. Those who brutally murdered our children also murder their own children,” Netanyahu wrote on X.

As the reports about the explosion emerged, IDF complained that “media outlets around the globe were quick to run Hamas’ headlines—without fact checking.” “We now know that an Islamic Jihad rocket aimed at Israel misfired and hit the hospital in Gaza,” IDF added.

Neither Islamic Jihad nor Israel has claimed the Palestinian group was involved in the October 7 attack, under cover of rocket fire, against Israeli communities near the Gaza border. Violence since then has killed more than 1,400 people in Israel, most of them civilians, and about 3,000 in Gaza, according to official figures. After the Gaza hospital strike, US President Joe Biden’s wartime trip to Israel and Jordan faltered before it got off the ground Tuesday, after the Amman leg was canceled.

As Biden, 80, climbed the steps of Air Force One, Jordan announced that a planned four-way summit with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, Jordanian King Abdullah II and Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was off. It would be held “when the decision to stop the war and put an end to these massacres has been taken,” said Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi.

(With agency inputs)