Israel furiously denies its airstrike left at least 500 dead

In a press conference at al-Shifa doctors stood in a sea of dead children who had been brought from the stricken hospital, holding some of their faces to the cameras to show the horror that had befallen them.

In the immediate aftermath Hamas called the devastation a ‘horrific massacre’ and a ‘crime of genocide’, laying blame at the feet of Israel.

British director of the charity that runs the hospital, Richard Sewell, said: ‘Disaster: our hospital, Ahli Arab hospital has taken a direct hit from an Israeli missile.

‘Early reports say hundreds of women and children killed. This is deliberate killing of vulnerable civilians. The bombs must stop now. There can be no possible justification for this.’

Among those wounded in the explosion were children, women and patients at the hospital. Pictured: A child at al-Shifa hospital after the fireball at al-Ahli hospital

It claimed that the attack had mostly killed people who were homeless after Israeli bombardments had destroyed their houses, with the dead including patients, women and children.

Izzat El-Reshiq, a senior Hamas member, said: ‘There are scores of dismembered and crushed bodies, baths of blood.’

The Israeli military blamed the explosion on Islamic Jihad, a smaller, more radical Palestinian militant group that often co-operates with Hamas in their shared struggle against Israel.

The military, in a statement, said that a ‘barrage of rockets was fired by terrorists in Gaza, passing in close proximity to Ahli hospital in Gaza at the time it was hit’.

An IDF spokesperson added: ‘Intelligence from multiple sources we have in our hands indicates that Islamic Jihad is responsible for the failed rocket launch which hit the hospital in Gaza.’

The Israeli army earlier on Tuesday said that a hospital is a ‘highly sensitive building’ and is ‘not an IDF target’, and urged ‘everyone to proceed with caution when reporting unverified claims of a terrorist organisation’.

This was backed up by Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow in airpower and technology at the Royal United Services Institute, who said video of the explosion did not match with the type of weapons Israel typically uses.

On Twitter he wrote: ‘For what it’s worth, this doesn’t look or sound quite like an air strike using the typical IAF 1000lb or 2000lb JDAM/Mk80 series to me. Incoming projectile sounds like it’s under power and the explosion frames visible look like largely propellant fire rather than HE [high explosive] detonation…’

The incident has raised tensions in the region even further, with Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon calling for ‘a day of unprecedented anger’ against Israel, while Libya’s foreign ministry accused the Jewish state of ‘war crimes and genocide’.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi issued a statement on Tuesday, saying ‘I condemn in the strongest of terms Israel’s bombardment’ on a hospital in Gaza, and calling it a ‘clear violation of international law’.

Meanwhile, Iran’s official Twitter account cryptically posted the words ‘time is up’, hours after its president Ebrahim Raisi declared ‘the flames of US-Israeli bombs… will soon consume the Zionists’.

World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote on X, formerly Twitter: ‘WHO strongly condemns the attack on al-Ahli Hospital in north Gaza. Early reports indicate hundreds of deaths and injuries.

‘We call for the immediate protection of civilians and health care, and for the evacuation orders to be reversed.’

But Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: ‘The entire world should know: It was barbaric terrorists in Gaza that attacked the hospital in Gaza, and not the IDF. Those who brutally murdered our children also murder their own children.’