 "Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu")
US President Joe Biden pledged solidarity with Israel on Wednesday, at what became the only stop of a West Asia mission otherwise derailed by a massive explosion at a Gaza hospital, which Biden said appeared to have been caused by Israel’s foes.
Palestinian officials blamed an Israeli air strike for the fireball that engulfed the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital on Tuesday evening, which they said had killed nearly 500 people.
Hamas said in a statement on Wednesday that the US was “blindly biased to Israel,” after Biden appeared to blame a blast at a hospital on the Palestinian militant group.
Israel said the blast was caused by a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group, which denied blame.
Speaking alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden said: “I was deeply saddened and outraged by the explosion of the hospital in Gaza yesterday, and based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you.”
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“But there’s a lot of people out there not sure, so we’ve got a lot, we’ve got to overcome a lot of things,” Biden added.
Biden later said his comment was based on information he had been shown by the US Department of Defense.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) presented further evidence backing up its assertion that the explosion in the parking lot of a Gazan hospital was caused by a misfired rocket launched by Palestinian terrorists, and not by an Israeli airstrike, according to a report by The Times of Israel.
The IDF accused global media outlets of accepting Hamas’s “lies” about the incident.
The army presented an intercepted conversation between Hamas officials saying the explosion was caused by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad projectile that fell short, and that the parking lot didn’t feature a crater in the ground and no structural damage was dealt to nearby buildings — both of which would typically have been left by an IDF strike.
Meanwhile, thousands of people have rallied across the countries of West Asia and North Africa to protest against the strike.
On Wednesday, people gathered outside the US and Israeli embassies in Amman, the capital of Jordan. Islamic parties in the country called for a general strike while the Jordanian government declared three days of mourning. In Beirut, protesters clashed with security forces who used water cannons to disperse crowds close to the US embassy. In Tunis, demonstrators gathered at the French embassy in the Tunisian capital, shouting slogans such as “The French and Americans are allies of Zionists”.
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