GAZA, (The Palestine Information Centre)The Palestinian resistance group Islamic Jihad on Wednesday described the Israel army’s accusations that it was responsible for a strike on a Gaza hospital as “lies that have no basis.”
At least 500 people were killed in an air strike on a hospital compound that sheltered the wounded and displaced from Israeli bombing, prompting global condemnation and fury.
“The Zionist enemy is trying hard to evade its responsibility for the brutal massacre it committed by bombing the Baptist Arab National Hospital in Gaza through his usual fabrication of lies and by pointing the finger of blame at the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine,” it said in a statement.
“We therefore affirm that the accusations put forward by the enemy are false and baseless,” it stressed.
According to the statement, the hospital had been ordered to evacuate by Israel under threat of bombardment, and it was a bomb dropped by an Israeli army plane that caused the tragedy.
It said the hospital had “received public notice made global of evacuation under threat of bombing”.
The Israeli army, for its part, claimed the hospital was hit by a rocket misfired by Islamic Jihad.
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 claimed that the army would also provide alleged conversations in Arabic that indicate the strike was done by Islamic Jihad.
