Visual evidence upends Israel’s official story for deadly attack on Gaza hospital
The Israeli military had said they targeted a Hamas camera in an August strike, but a Reuters investigation found the device actually belonged to the news agency. An Israeli military official now says troops fired without required approval. Five journalists died in the attack. Their deaths are among some 200 journalist killings by Israel that it has yet to fully explain.
A Reuters analysis of visual evidence and other information about the Israeli attack on a Gaza hospital last month contradicts Israel's explanation of what happened in the deadly strike.
The August 25 attack on Nasser Hospital killed 22, including five journalists. Israeli forces planned the attack using drone footage which, a military official said, showed a Hamas camera that was the target of the strike. But the visual evidence and other reporting by Reuters establish that the camera in the footage actually belonged to the news agency and had long been used by one of its own journalists.
The Israeli military official now says that the troops acted without the required approval of the senior regional commander in charge of operations in Gaza. The official told Reuters about the breach of command after Reuters presented the findings of its investigation to the Israel Defense Forces.
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A day after Israeli tanks shelled Nasser Hospital, the official said the IDF's initial review found that troops targeted a Hamas camera because it was filming them from the hospital. The official said troops viewed the camera with suspicion because it was covered by a towel. A decision was made to destroy it, the official said then.
A screenshot from the IDF drone footage shows the camera, draped with a two-toned cloth, on the hospital stairwell. The military official confirmed to Reuters last week that the cloth-covered camera was the target.
But the cloth shown in the screenshot was not put there by Hamas. It was a prayer rug belonging to Hussam al-Masri, a Reuters journalist who was killed in the attack, the news agency's investigation of the incident found. At least 35 times since May, Masri had positioned his camera on the same stairwell at Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, to record live broadcasts fed to Reuters media clients across the globe. He often covered his camera with the green-and-white prayer rug to protect it from heat and dust, Reuters found.
The Reuters investigation provides the most complete account to date of how the attack unfolded, including that Israeli forces breached the chain of command. Reuters also has established definitively that the targeted camera belonged to the news agency. The Associated Press, which lost a journalist in the hospital attack, previously reported that it had found strong indications that the camera Israeli forces described as their target belonged to Reuters.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the hospital attack a "tragic mishap." The military official told Reuters that Masri and other journalists present were not the target of the attack and were not suspected of having ties to Hamas.
The IDF claim that Hamas was filming Israeli military forces from Nasser Hospital "is false and fabricated," said Ismail Al-Thawabta, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office. Israel is trying to "cover up a full-fledged war crime against the hospital, its patients and medical staff," he said.
Despite the new disclosures, a month after the attack the IDF has yet to fully explain how it ended up hitting the Reuters camera and killing Masri. The Israeli military also has not explained:
- Why it did not warn hospital staff or Reuters that it intended to strike the hospital.
- Why, after striking the camera in its initial attack, the IDF shelled the stairwell again nine minutes later, killing other journalists and emergency responders who had rushed to the scene.
- Whether it took into account that the hospital stairwell where Masri was filming when he was killed was a spot used regularly by many journalists to record footage and file reports throughout the war.
- Who approved the strike. The military official did not say who gave the order to attack despite the lack of approval from the regional commander.
The absence of a full explanation of what happened at Nasser Hospital fits a pattern in Israeli military attacks that have killed journalists since Israel launched its nearly two-year offensive after the Hamas attack on 7 October, 2023. The Committee to Protect Journalists says it has documented 201 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza, Israel and Lebanon, where the war spilled over shortly after the initial attack. The count includes 193 Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza, six killed by Israel in Lebanon, and two Israelis killed in the October 7 attack.
The CPJ said Israel has never published the results of a formal investigation or held anyone accountable in the killings of journalists by the IDF. "Furthermore, none of these incidents prompted a meaningful review of Israel's rules of engagement, nor did international condemnation lead to any change in the pattern of attacks on journalists over the past two years," said Sara Qudah, CPJ's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa.
"The IDF operates to mitigate harm to civilians as much as possible, including journalists," an IDF spokesperson said. "Given the ongoing exchanges of fire, remaining in an active combat zone has inherent risks. The IDF directs its strikes only towards military targets and military operatives, and does not target civilian objects and civilians, including media organizations and journalists as such."
In examining the 25 August attack by Israeli forces, Reuters reviewed more than 100 videos and photos from the scene and interviewed more than two dozen people familiar with the attack and the events leading up to it. Those sources include two Israeli military officials and two Israeli military academics briefed by Israeli military sources on the strike.
All told, 22 people were killed in the two attacks, including journalist Mariam Dagga, who worked for the Associated Press and other news organizations, and Moaz Abu Taha, a freelance journalist who worked with several news organizations including Reuters. Dagga and Masri were among many journalists who routinely gathered on the landing to record from a high vantage point and to file reports from the Khan Younis area of Gaza. Masri's live broadcasts captured Israeli strikes, ambulances bringing the wounded and the dead to the hospital, and the destruction of the surrounding area.
A few days before the 25 August strike, an Israeli military surveillance drone recorded a camera on the top level of the eastern stairwell at Nasser Hospital, according to the Israeli military official, who cited the IDF's initial inquiry, and the two military academics with close contacts in the Israeli military. Troops characterized the camera as a threat, they said, because Hamas has used cameras to plan attacks. Asked whether the group used cameras, the Hamas official said it used them to document its attacks on Israeli soldiers.
A screenshot taken from the drone footage shows a thick, two-toned cloth draped over the camera. A person wearing a white head covering and dark clothing sits behind it. The screenshot was first published on 25 August by an Israeli TV news channel, N12, which said at the time that it depicted the camera "that endangered our troops."
Reuters obtained the screenshot from Refael Hayun, an Israeli civilian who says he monitors the situation in Gaza, where he has contacts on the ground. Hayun said the drone footage was captured around 2:15pm on 21 August. On that day, Masri set up a camera to record from the hospital stairwell continuously between 8:00am and 6:14pm, according to a Reuters archive of the footage.
Hayun declined to identify the source of the screenshot or how he obtained it. But the Israeli military official confirmed that the screenshot is from drone footage that Israeli troops recorded before the 25 August attack and shows the camera that troops targeted in the shelling. The official, who said his information is from the IDF's initial inquiry, did not provide the precise date of the screenshot but said the camera was seen "repeatedly for many days in a row."
"The camera from that picture was the camera that they attacked," the Israeli military official told Reuters on 16 September.
The cloth covering Masri's camera became a focus of attention after the attack – both because the Israelis cited it as a factor that justified the strike and because it provided a clue to the true ownership of the device.
On the day after the strike, the Israeli military official referred to the cloth as a "towel" and said troops viewed it with suspicion. The official said that towels can be used to evade IDF heat sensors and visual observations from the sky. The troops saw "a lot of suspicious behavior that was tracked for days and cross-referenced with intelligence," he said, without elaborating.
But instead of a towel, the cloth covering the camera in the drone screenshot was Masri's green and white prayer rug, Reuters found. It is shown in an 13 August photo taken by Dagga, the AP journalist. Dagga's photo captures Masri standing next to his camera in the same hospital stairwell that was targeted by the IDF.
Masri routinely covered the Reuters camera to protect the equipment's optics and electronics from the scorching heat that enveloped Gaza in August, according to three members of the Reuters visuals team. He often used the thick cloth, which was his prayer rug, according to Masri's brother Ezzeldeen al-Masri. Reuters was never told by Israel not to cover its camera with a towel or other cloth, a spokesperson for the news agency said.
Witnesses say the camera in the drone screenshot could only be Masri's. No one else in the last few months used a large video camera on a tripod to record there or covered the gear with a prayer rug. Other journalists used cellular phones, the witnesses said.
Adding to the Israeli military's suspicion about the camera and its location was that troops also saw another "towel" covering the head of a person nearby, the military official said.
In the screenshot from IDF drone footage that shows the troops' target, a person sits near the camera wearing dark clothing and what appears to be a white headscarf. The person appears to be Dagga, in a similar outfit to what she is seen wearing in four other visuals taken at that same location, including one from August 16 and another from the day of the attack. On August 21, the day the IDF drone footage was recorded, Dagga was using her phone to record a live broadcast from the stairwell for the AP.
Reuters visuals journalist Mohammad Salem, who left Gaza earlier this year and knew Dagga well, identified the person in the drone screenshot as the AP reporter. Salem said he recognized her head scarf. Also, Masri had told Salem that Dagga was recording near him on the stairwell a few days before the attack.
When he was killed on 25 August, Masri had been recording from the hospital's stairwell for about two hours. As he had done routinely throughout the month, he had positioned his camera on the fourth floor to capture live coverage of the area. The elevated spot allowed for better visibility, access to electricity and a stronger internet connection, said Salem. From the stairwell, the camera recorded the hospital's surroundings, including the busy street out front.
"We thought the hospital was relatively safe, especially since everyone knows that there are journalists in this place and that they use it on a daily basis," said Salem.
In the early days of the war, Reuters shared with the Israeli military locations of its teams in Gaza, including at Nasser Hospital, to try to ensure they would not be targeted, the Reuters spokesperson said. But after many journalists were killed in IDF strikes, Reuters stopped giving precise coordinates.
"However, Israel was fully aware that Reuters and multiple other news organizations were operating from Nasser Hospital, which has been one of the nerve centers for coverage out of Gaza," the spokesperson said.
Witnesses said the IDF had drones in the sky throughout the attack. About 40 minutes before the first tank strike, Reuters photographer Hatem Khaled was outside the hospital. He sent a message to Khan Younis colleagues on a WhatsApp group: "Quadcopter now, exactly over Nasser Hospital."
At 10:12am, about four minutes after the first attack, freelance journalist Khaled Shaath recorded a quadcopter drone flying over the hospital.
Ahmed Abu Ubeid, a doctor in the forensic medicine department at Nasser who was injured in the second strike, said the drone hovered in the air near the hospital entrance for more than 10 minutes. "It was recording and seeing us and seeing we are all doctors and civil defense and nurses and journalists," Abu Ubeid told Reuters. "So, they saw us, and decided to hit us."
Abu Ubeid said some of those killed and injured in the attack were on the ground level, multiple floors below where the tank shells struck, and were hit with shrapnel.
If they had warned us, we would have prevented this catastrophe.
Israeli forces have repeatedly targeted hospitals in Gaza, saying Hamas was operating from them, which the group denies.
Attacks on hospitals typically constitute war crimes, two legal scholars told Reuters. There is a narrow exception when a hospital is used for "activity harmful to the enemy," said Tom Dannenbaum, a professor at Stanford Law School. But even when this threshold is met, attackers must ensure that expected civilian harm isn't excessive compared to military advantage, and they must first give warning to allow the other side to stop misusing the hospital and provide reasonable time to comply, he said.
Mohammed Saqer, head of nursing at Nasser Hospital, said the IDF had the phone numbers for hospital staff and regularly called the head of the hospital to ask about the number of patients and supplies. The hospital never received a warning of the attack, he said.
"If they had warned us, we would have prevented this catastrophe," Saqer told Reuters over text message. Reuters also never received a warning of the attack, according to the Reuters spokesperson.
The names of Masri, 49, Dagga, 33, and those of three other journalists killed in the 25 August attack add to a long list of journalists killed during the Israeli offensive while doing their work and in circumstances the IDF has rarely helped elucidate.
Reuters still has received no explanation for why, in October 2023, an Israeli tank fired two shells at a group of clearly identified journalists in Lebanon who had been filming cross-border shelling. The strikes killed Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and wounded six other journalists. Nearly two years after the attack, the case is still under examination, an IDF official told Reuters last week. Hostilities spread to the Israel-Lebanon border shortly after the Hamas attack on October 7, when Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel.
The list of unexplained IDF killings of journalists dates back to before the Gaza war.
In May 2022, Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, wearing a clearly marked press vest, was shot dead while covering an Israeli army raid in the West Bank city of Jenin. Israeli authorities initially said that armed Palestinians were likely responsible; later, Israel's military concluded there was "a high possibility" that the Palestinian-American national was "accidentally hit by IDF gunfire." No criminal investigation would be launched, the military said at the time.
Al Jazeera condemned the killing of its reporter as a "heinous crime," saying it was intended to "prevent the media from conducting their duty." In May 2023, a military spokesman told CNN that the IDF was "very sorry" for the death of Abu Akleh. The IDF has not provided a full account of how she was killed.
We thought the hospital was relatively safe, especially since everyone knows that there are journalists in this place and that they use it on a daily basis.
After the killings of Abdallah and Abu Akleh, Israel said its forces do not intentionally target journalists.
Since 7 October, 2023, however, Israel has accused at least 15 journalists or media workers it killed in Gaza and Lebanon of being members of militant groups, according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists. The CPJ said it found no case in which Israel presented credible or sufficient evidence to justify the killings.
The military official who spoke to Reuters and other journalists the day after the Nasser Hospital attack said repeatedly that the IDF had not targeted the Reuters or AP journalists. "They are a big part of why we're looking into this incident," he said. "There was no intention to harm them."
That same day, the Israeli military released the names of six men whom it said were "terrorists" killed in the strikes on the hospital, without providing any evidence.
One of the men listed by the IDF, Omar Abu Teim, was killed elsewhere, not in the 25 August attack, said Al-Thawabta, the head of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office.
Another man was a first responder, according to a statement by the Palestinian Civil Defense, Gaza's emergency services organization. Reuters identified him in footage from August 25, in which he's seen rushing up the staircase after the first strike and helping direct the emergency response. After the second strike, his body can be seen hanging off the ledge on the fourth floor.
A third man listed by the IDF was a member of the hospital staff, according to a post on Nasser Hospital's Facebook page.
Two other men were visiting patients at the hospital and were taking part in rescue efforts when they were killed in the second strike, according to members of their families, who said the men had no affiliation with armed groups.
Reuters could find no details about the sixth man, except to confirm that he was killed in the strikes on 25 August.
On the day after the attack, the military official who spoke to Reuters said that troops operating near Nasser Hospital identified a camera pointed at them in the days before the strike and that actions were approved "to remove the threat." In a separate statement released publicly the same day, the IDF identified the troops involved as belonging to the Golani Brigade.
Masri's recordings from Gaza captured a wide array of scenes in front of Nasser Hospital, with some shots showing military activity far in the distance. On 20 and 21 August, for instance, the camera captured Israeli diggers and a bulldozer excavating a demolished area 2.4 kilometers northeast of the hospital. Satellite imagery of the area on those dates shows the equipment surrounded by at least five tanks, which are not discernible in Masri's footage.
Citing the IDF's initial review of the 25 August incident, the Israeli military official told Reuters that troops had correctly identified the target of the attack. The official, however, said that the IDF had launched a closer examination into possible mistakes made in the attack's execution.
"We're looking into this incident to understand what went wrong in the process of execution, acting against a real target that was threatening the forces," he said.
Among the failures, Reuters found, was a breach in the chain of command.
IDF rules require the approval of a very senior officer before firing on a civilian target if troops are not under attack, the military official said. In the case of Nasser Hospital, the forces on the ground would have had to obtain authorization from the head of the IDF's Southern Command, which has overall responsibility for the Gaza front. But the troops did not have approval from the commander, Maj. Gen. Yaniv Asor, the military official said. Reached by phone, Asor told Reuters that he was not authorized to speak to the press.
Authorization for the strike would have had to include a legal assessment to ensure that the characterization of the target complied with international law, a second Israeli military official said. Such assessments are binding on Israeli troops; an attack is not supposed to proceed without this permission. The official said he was not aware that any such legal advisory was sought or given before the attack on Nasser.
In addition to possible mistakes in the execution of the attack, the IDF has said it also would review which ammunition was approved prior to the strike and how.
Reuters obtained photos of metal fragments found at Nasser Hospital taken by a doctor at the scene that day. The fragments are from tail fins of Israeli-made 120 mm tank rounds, according to five munitions experts who reviewed the photos of the fragments and visuals of the strike for Reuters.
A similar tank shell was used in the 2023 Israeli military attack that killed Reuters video journalist Abdallah in Lebanon.
A tank round was a disproportionate munition selection for the Nasser strike, given that the IDF says its target was a camera and that it was located at or within a hospital, said Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser and policy analyst at the Pentagon, where he was branch chief of civilian harm assessments. But even a weapon that is likely to result in fewer unintended injuries and deaths than a tank shell will still have a high casualty count when aimed at a crowded stairwell, Bryant said.
The IDF still has not explained why it struck the stairwell a second time, as journalists and first responders crowded on the landing.
Reuters photographer Khaled was outside the hospital preparing to start his workday when the first blast hit. He grabbed his camera and rushed toward the building, documenting the scene along the way. He climbed the stairs to get to Masri. When he found him, Masri was already dead, his body covered in dust, his clothes torn and his equipment damaged.
Khaled kept filming. "I couldn't do anything to help him other than document what had happened," he said. Rescue workers arrived and began moving Masri, placing him in a white bag.
At 10:17am, as Khaled and the rescuers walked down the stairs with Masri's body, the Israeli military struck the stairwell for the second time.
Two munitions can be seen hitting the hospital a fraction of a second apart in footage obtained by Reuters. Khaled filmed the strike, which left him injured. Khaled has hearing loss from the blast and will require more surgery to remove shrapnel.
