A huge explosion at a Gaza hospital killed hundreds of Palestinians, wrecking a diplomatic mission by U.S. President Joe Biden, who arrived in Israel on Wednesday but was snubbed by Arab leaders who called off an emergency summit.
Palestinian officials blamed an Israeli air strike for the huge blast and fireball which engulfed the Al- Ahli al -Arabi hospital. Israel denied responsibility and said the blast was caused by a failed rocket launch by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group, which denied blame.
Biden’s trip to the Middle East was supposed to calm the region, even as he demonstrated U.S. support for its ally Israel, which has vowed to annihilate the Hamas movement whose fighters killed 1,300 Israelis in a rampage on Oct. 7.
But after the hospital blast, Jordan cancelled the crucial second half of Biden’s itinerary: a planned summit in Amman with the leaders of Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority to shore up aid to Gaza and avert wider war.
The scenes of destruction from the hospital were horrific even by the standards of the past 12 days, which have confronted the world with relentless images, first of Israelis slaughtered in their homes and then of Palestinian families buried under rubble from Israel’s retaliatory strikes.
Rescue workers scoured blood-stained debris for survivors. A Gaza civil defence chief gave a death toll of 300, while health ministry sources put it at 500. Palestinian ministry spokesperson Ashraf Al-Qudra said rescuers were still pulling bodies from the rubble.