Biden flies into Middle East tinderbox: President tells Israel’s PM Netanyahu hospital bloodbath ‘appears to have been done by the other team’ as he lands in Tel Aviv with Gaza ‘spiralling out of control’

President Joe Biden today said a devastating blast on a Gaza hospital that killed 500 people appears not to have been caused by Israel – but instead ‘by the other team’ referring to Palestinian terrorists.

Biden arrived in Israel today in a desperate bid to prevent the war with Hamas from spiralling into a wider conflict that would engulf the Middle East following the deadly fireball explosion at the hospital.

A huge blast ripped through the al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City last night while it was being used to treat and shelter thousands of civilians who were trying to avoid Israel’s relentless barrage of airstrikes.

The devastating fireball has sparked a venomous blame game between Hamas and Israel, with the terrorists claiming it was the result of an Israeli air strike while the IDF blamed Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group, for a misfired rocket. 

After being embraced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden told the leader it ‘appears’ to have not been caused by Israel but instead ‘by the other team’. It’s not clear if he was referring to Islamic Jihad or Hamas terrorists. 

‘Based on what I’ve seen, it appears as though it was done by the other team, not you,’ Biden said before adding there were ‘a lot of people out there’ who weren’t sure what caused the blast.

His comments came after the Israeli military today provided what it called evidence to show that the attack wasn’t from them and there wasn’t a direct hit on the hospital before claiming there were no craters consistent with an airstrike. 

The hospital blast has sparked a torrent of global anger, with Iran – Israel’s foe – declaring last night that the ‘time is up’ for the country and Tehran-backed terror group Hezbollah calling for a ‘day of rage’.

The explosion came just hours before Biden touched down in Israel for a diplomatic scramble to prevent the war with Hamas from spiralling into an even larger conflict. As if to underline the high stakes involved, the Israeli military said rocket sirens were sounding in a village near Gaza just as Air Force One touched down.

The explosion has thrown Biden’s visit to the region into chaos, with a planned meeting involving him, the president of Palestine Mahmoud Abbas, and leaders from Egypt and Jordan cancelled by the Arab nations in protest.

This damning move by the Middle Eastern states has cost Biden an opportunity for the face-to-face conversations he views as crucial for navigating this fraught moment amid growing anger and an expected ground invasion of Gaza. 

Hellish video taken from the hospital, which was sheltering around 6,000 Palestinians and is funded by the Anglican Church, shows fire engulfing the building and the dozens of bodies strewn over the ground, many of them young children.

Ambulances and private cars rushed some 350 casualties from the al-Ahli blast to Gaza City’s main hospital, al-Shifa, already overwhelmed with wounded from other strikes, said its director, Mohammed Abu Selmia. 

‘We are squeezing five beds into a single tiny room. We need equipment, we need medicine, we need beds, we need everything,’ Mr Abu Selmia said, warning that the fuel supply for the hospital’s generators will run out on Wednesday. ‘I think Gaza’s medical sector will collapse within hours.’ 

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.

The head of the World Health Organisation today issued a stark warning, saying the situation in Gaza is ‘spiralling out of control’ while calling for the ‘violence on all sides to stop’ so that Israel’s siege can be lifted and medical supplies let into the enclave. 

‘Every second we wait to get medical aid in, we lose lives,’ Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. ‘We need immediate access to start delivering life-saving supplies.’ 

In the immediate aftermath of the devastating blast, Hamas called the devastation a ‘horrific massacre’ and a ‘crime of genocide’, laying blame at the feet of Israel. But Israel quickly refuted that claim, instead blaming Hamas for striking the hospital with a misfired rocket. 

The horrific blast has raised already heightened fears that the Hamas-Israel conflict will engulf the Middle East, with Iran’s foreign minister declaring that the ‘time is over’ for Israel. 

Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group based in Lebanon, called for ‘a day of unprecedented anger’ against Israel, while Libya’s foreign ministry accused the Jewish state of ‘war crimes and genocide’.

Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister, later arrived in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday night after the hospital bombing – a remarkable show of unity between two former sworn enemies. 

While there, Amir Abdollahian issued a stark warning to Israel, with the foreign minister tweeting: After the terrible crime of the Zionist regime in the bombing and massacre of more than a thousand innocent women and children in the hospital, the time has come for the global unity of humanity against this fake regime more hated than ISIS and its killing machine. Time is OVER.’ 

Justin Bronk, a RUSI analyst, said that Iran’s threats, and the international revulsion sparked by the Gaza hospital attack, were deeply troubling in a region already on tenterhooks. 

Anger boiled over across the Middle East following the hospital strike, with demonstrators in Beirut, Lebanon, setting the U.S. embassy on fire before security forces fired tear gas at them in fierce clashes. 

Angry protesters also descended on the streets of Turkey and Jordan close to Israel’s embassies there, while Palestinian security forces fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse anti-government protesters in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah. 

This anger could boil over to Europe, with protests expected in London later today. It comes as the head of MI5, the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency, warned the conflict in Gaza could increase the chance of a terrorist attack on British soil. 

Israel’s military today reiterated its denial it was behind the strike on the hospital, accusing Islamic Jihad of carrying out the attack before adding that some 450 rockets fired from Gaza have fallen short and landed inside the strip in the last 11 days.

IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari accused Hamas of inflating the number of casualties from the explosion and said it could not know as quickly as it claimed what caused the blast. 

Hagari told a news conference this morning: ‘I want to make something clear: it is impossible to know what happened as quickly as Hamas claimed they knew. 

‘That should have been an initial warning sign for many. Unlike Hamas, the IDF launched an immediate examination.’

He added that the military had seen no evidence of a direct hit on the hospital, adding that there was no structural damage to buildings around the building and no craters consistent with an airstrike.

Hagari said: ‘Evidence – which we are sharing with you all – confirms that the explosion at the hospital in Gaza was caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket that misfired.’

‘Our radar system tracked missiles fired by terrorists in Gaza at the time of the explosion and the trajectory analysis of the rockets shows the rockets were fired in close proximity to the hospital.’

However, the terror group has labelled Israel’s claims as ‘completely incorrect’ and accused the IDF of ‘trying to cover for the horrifying crime and massacre they committed against civilians’. 

Biden today embraced Netanyahu as he landed in Tel Aviv before going on to meet with the Israeli war cabinet. Biden will aim to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, where millions of Palestinians are surviving with scant food, fuel and water due to Israel’s siege.

‘He’ll be asking some tough questions, he’ll be asking them as a friend, as a true friend of Israel, but he’ll be asking some questions of them,’ Kirby said.

Biden has strongly backed top ally Israel and its military campaign – retaliation for the killing of 1,400 people who were shot, mutilated or burnt to death in shock cross-border attacks launched by Hamas on October 7.

Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas and try to rescue 199 hostages from the besieged and blockaded territory had already left at least 3,000 dead inside Gaza before the hospital was destroyed. 

Entire Gaza neighbourhoods have been razed and survivors are left with dwindling supplies of food, water and fuel, unable to flee the 25-mile long strip that has been blockaded since 2007 by Israel and Egypt. 

Biden also planned to meet Israeli first responders and the families of those killed and hostages taken when Hamas made its incursion into Israel.

It was unclear what Biden could accomplish during his visit. Kirby said the U.S. president planned to speak with Abbas and Sisi on his way back to Washington.

‘This sort of murky but horrific event makes diplomacy harder and increases escalation risks,’ said Richard Gowan, U.N. director at International Crisis Group.

Roughly 2,800 Palestinians have been reported killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza. Another 1,200 people are believed to be buried under the rubble, alive or dead, health authorities said.

Biden said in a statement that he was ‘outraged and deeply saddened by the explosion at the Al Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza, and the terrible loss of life that resulted.’

He also said he ‘directed my national security team to continue gathering information about what exactly happened’.

On the ground in Gaza, the blast at the Christian-run hospital brought new chaos and suffering Tuesday night, as the dead were pulled from the rubble and the wounded were rushed to nearby medical centres.

Scores of bodies cloaked in blood-stained sheets and white plastic wrap soon lined the floors at the nearby the Al-Shifa hospital, where stunned and bereaved relatives tried to identify loved ones.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said hundreds died including women, children, staff and ‘internally displaced people seeking safe shelter’.

Ghassan Abu Sittah, a doctor with the charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF), recounted that ‘we were operating in the hospital. There was a strong explosion and the ceiling fell on the operating room’.

‘Hospitals are not a target,’ he said. ‘This bloodshed must stop. Enough is enough.’

Biden’s trip will test the limits of US influence in the Middle East at a volatile time. It is his second trip to a conflict zone this year, after visiting Ukraine in February.

The visit to Israel coincides with rising humanitarian concerns in Gaza, where Israel has cut off the flow of food, fuel and water.

Mediators have been struggling to break a deadlock over providing supplies to desperate civilians, aid groups and hospitals.

The deadly hospital blast comes just days after Netanyahu called for the ‘world to unite to defeat Hamas as it defeated ISIS and the Nazis’ while warning Iran and Hezbollah ‘not to test us’.

Netanyahu warned Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon and their Iranian backers that they will pay a ‘high price’ if they enter the conflict and join Hamas in its war against Israel.

But with Iran and Hezbollah’s threatening Israel its ‘time is up’ following the blast at the hospital, there are growing fears that the terrorist group will do just that. 

Netanyahu had earlier warned Israel was ‘approaching a fateful hour’ with more than 400,000 Israeli soldiers now gearing up for a battle in Gaza that will see street-fighting erupt in the tiny 25-mile long enclave in response to Hamas’ attacks on October 7, which killed 1,400 Israelis.  

More than one million people have now fled their homes in northern Gaza in scenes of chaos and despair in a desperate attempt to escape Israel’s imminent invasion and continued aerial bombardment of the Hamas-ruled territory.

But the United Nations has warned that a ‘spectre of death’ looms over Gaza where millions are stranded amid Israel’s total siege that is blocking food, water, medicine and fuel from reaching the enclave. 

The enclave’s food and water supplies are running dangerously low, and its hospitals are warning that they are on the verge of collapse, with medics saying health centres are quickly turning into morgues.