Hamas, the Islamist terror group that controls Gaza, immediately blamed an Israeli airstrike for an explosion at the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital on Tuesday night.
Israeli officials soon hit back with counter-claims that a rocket fired by militants from Islamic Jihad that failed shortly after launch was responsible instead.
Three main clues from open source intelligence investigations have provided an insight into who might have been behind the explosion that killed hundreds of people.
Trajectory
Initial reports suggested the rocket could have been shot down by Israel’s Iron Dome air-defence system.
But weapons experts say video clips seem to show a missile failure, which may have led to parts of it falling out of the sky.
The hospital is located between the apparent rocket launch area and the Israeli border.
Fabian Hoffman, a defence and missile technology expert from the University of Oslo, said a “Hamas rocket experiencing some type of systematic error causing it to fall on the hospital” was the “most plausible explanation so far”.
Sound of impact
The noise made by the projectile as it fell from the sky and hit the ground was not consistent with an Israeli missile, some commentators believe.
Justin Bronk, a leading air power expert at the Rusi think tank, said the object sounded under-powered in video footage posted online.
He also believes that the explosion on the ground appeared to be a fireball, likely caused by part of the rocked holding the fuel exploding on impact.
“Incoming projectile sounds like it’s under power[ed] and the explosion frames visible look like largely propellant fire rather than high explosive detonation,” Mr Bronk wrote on Twitter.
Hamas usually creates rockets out of improvised materials because of a blockade preventing military shipments into Gaza.
Mr Hoffmann suggested the rocket’s warhead may not have detonated in the car park of the hospital, suggesting it was shrapnel and rocket fuel that caused the blast.
Aftermath
Images of the hospital car park, which bore the brunt of the strike, showed only three cars with signs of major structural damage from impact, rather than a subsequent fire
One had been flipped by the blast, while the others had been dented and thrown a short distance from their parked positions by the impact.
Nearby vehicles were charred with damage consistent with a fire, which may have been caused by fuel in nearby vehicles being ignited.
“This is the most noticeable damage to the ground, which, if it were the impact point of the munition used, would mean it’s pretty small payload,” Eliot Higgins, founder of Bellingcat, the leading open source investigation agency.
Nathan Ruser, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote on Twitter: “The photos of the scene are, to me, not consistent with an airstrike and are not consistent with claims that 500 plus people were killed.”
Within the 10-metre impact site, most of the cars were undamaged and structurally untouched by the arriving munition.
There also appeared to be very minimal damage to the nearby hospital building, which is around 20 metres from the impact site.
A high-powered bomb dropped by Israel’s Air Force would likely have a blast radius of around 370 metres, with a kill zone of up to 33 metres.
Drone footage published by Israel’s armed forces, and analysed by Mr Ruser, showed limited damage to tiles on the hospital’s roof.
The researcher added: “This would be consistent with an object that broke apart in midair,” although he cautioned the damage may have been inflicted at an earlier date.
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