Shafaq News/ Joe Biden said on Wednesday that the deadly explosion in a Gaza hospital appeared to have been caused by Palestinians, not the Israeli military, as outrage accusations fanned across the globe.
Appearing with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, the US president sided with accounts that blamed the blast on a misfired rocket by Palestinian militants, rather than an Israeli air strike.
“Based on what I have seen, it was done by the other team, not you,” Biden said. “But there’s a lot of people out there who are not sure, so we’ve got to overcome a lot of things.”
The US president’s trip is intended as a show of solidarity for Israel, to prevent the country’s war with Hamas from spreading throughout the region and to help facilitate humanitarian assistance for the Gaza Strip.
Biden also called for “life-saving capacity to help the Palestinians who are innocent, caught in the middle of this”.
While noting that 31 Americans had been among the people killed by Hamas’s attack, he added, “We also need to bear in mind Hamas does not represent all the Palestinian people and has brought them only suffering.”
Netanyahu praised Biden for his “moral clarity” and “steadfast commitment to provide Israel with the tools we need to defend ourselves”, as he compared the Hamas attack that precipitated the war with “20 9/11s”.
The Israeli prime minister added, “The civilised world must unite to defeat Hamas.”
But Biden’s visit has been overshadowed by the blast at Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City, which prompted Arab leaders to cancel a summit with Biden that had been scheduled for Wednesday.
While Israel has blamed the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group for the explosion, Palestinian officials say the cause was an Israeli airstrike that killed hundreds of people.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society said the hospital was packed with women, children, healthcare professionals and internally displaced people seeking shelter.
The Israeli Forces said on Wednesday that an internal probe had concluded that a rocket launched from a cemetery near the hospital just before the explosion had misfired and crashed into a car park adjacent to the hospital.
After news of the explosion broke late on Tuesday, Jordan cancelled the summit that King Abdullah had planned to host for Biden, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas.
Abbas pulled out of the summit and announced a three-day mourning period for what he called “a great calamity and a heinous war crime”, in remarks quoted by the Palestinian Wafa news agency. Protests broke out in Ramallah and other parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Tuesday evening.
The United Arab Emirates condemned what it called “the Israeli attack”. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan also blamed Israel for the explosion, which King Abdullah labelled a “massacre” and war crime.
The hospital is in the northern part of Gaza, which Israel has been bombarding heavily ahead of a widely expected ground incursion.
Israel has laid siege to Gaza and told people to evacuate the territory’s north last week, in a mass displacement order that affected about 1mn people, or nearly half Gaza’s population. Aid agencies have raised alarm about what they say is a major humanitarian crisis as Palestinians flee south.
Israel’s bombardment of the densely populated and heavily urbanised coastal enclave has already killed over 3,000 people. Israel says its goal is to eliminate Hamas’s leadership from Gaza.
