@zackster even the BBC and The Guardian are leaning in to the view that the evidence points to the hospital destruction being caused by a failed rocket, rather than an Israeli airstrike:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67144061
"We contacted 20 think tanks, universities and companies with weapons expertise. Nine of them are yet to respond, five would not comment, but we spoke to experts at the remaining six.
We asked whether the available evidence - including the size of the explosion and the sounds heard beforehand - could be used to determine the cause of the hospital blast.
So far, the findings are inconclusive. Three experts we spoke to say it is not consistent with what you would expect from a typical Israeli air strike with a large munition.
J Andres Gannon, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University, in the US, says the ground explosions appeared to be small, meaning that the heat generated from the impact may have been caused by leftover rocket fuel rather than an explosion from a warhead.
Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute, agrees. While it is difficult to be sure at such an early stage, he says, the evidence looks like the explosion was caused by a failed rocket section hitting the car park and causing a fuel and propellant fire.
Mr Gannon says it is not possible to determine whether the projectile struck its intended target from the footage he has seen. He adds that the flashes in the sky likely indicate the projectile was a rocket with an engine that overheated and stopped working.
Valeria Scuto, lead Middle East analyst at Sibylline, a risk assessment company, notes that Israel has the capacity to carry out other forms of air strike by drone, where they might use Hellfire missiles. These missiles generate a significant amount of heat but would not necessarily leave a large crater. But she says uncorroborated footage shows a pattern of fires at the hospital site that was not consistent with this explanation."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/18/al-ahli-arab-hospital-piecing-together-what-happened-as-israel-insists-militant-rocket-to-blame
" Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon chief of high value targeting during the Iraq war in 2003, told the Guardian: āThe number [of casualties] is astronomically high, an absolute high range of all time if true.
āThe crater is not consistent with an airstrike, it is more likely to be a weapon that failed and released its payload over a wide area.
āThe crater and surrounding damage is also not consistent with a JDAM aerial bomb. The hole on the ground occurred from kinetic energy.ā
The JDAM, or joint direct attack munition, is a precision-guided air-to-surface weapon system that is part of the Israeli arsenal provided by the US.
Israel has said it used 6,000 bombs in the first six days of the conflict, more than the US used in a year during its operations in Afghanistan and double what the US-led coalition used against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in a month.
Justin Bronk, the senior research fellow for airpower and military technology at RUSI in London, said that while the results were not conclusive, no crater or obvious shrapnel pattern consistent with standard JDAM bombs was visible in images of the aftermath.
āIf this is the extent of the damage then Iād say an airstrike looks less likely than a rocket failure causing an explosion and fuel fire,ā he added."
