Nathan Ruser Profile picture
Picking quarrels and provoking trouble (寻衅滋事) Analyst at @ASPI_CTS

Oct 18, 2023, 16 tweets

This thread is going around attempting to show 'proof' that Israel was responsible for the explosion at the Gazan hospital.

It does not, the video is from a totally different incident, hour after the hospital blast and shows a strike 1.5-4km away. I'll explain why.

First, I want to preface this analysis by pointing out that this account has been spreading disinformation and denialism about Ukraine for over a year. They have never acted in good faith, but for the people sharing his crap without knowing this I'll refute it at face value.

The argument is immediately refutable since the same camera did film the explosion at the hospital, in footage youve probably seen, an hour earlier, at 6:59pm.
The time stamp in the video he shared is an hour later, at 7:59pm.

Note that the IDF claims the explosion happened at 6:59pm (and claimed that before this video was released), the first open reports of the blast were around 7:15-7:20pm, all well before the video this jabroni is sharing, which is literally timestamped 7:59pm.

He stupidly claims that the reason for this is that the camera's timestamp was off by an hour.

Not impossible in its own right, but very stupid here because if the footage that says 6:59 was actually shot at 5:59, it'd be daylight.

He then also tried to geolocate the video, and gets it wrong.

The cone of view he's claiming the camera can show isn't even pointing at Gaza City. It literally would not show the hospital, and the rocket fire would be shooting from Israel (into Israel)

Morever, let's look at the picture and geolocation side-by-side. Even if it was this building, he's looking at the wrong side of it. The buildings he is claiming it shows also has a column of windows between the black decal and the corner, which the footage shows isnt the case.

In fairness, the geolocation is only off by about 200m. But it is facing the entirely wrong direction. The camera was actually at 31.439871, 34.573232 and (obviously) facing West towards Gaza and not north towards Ashkelon.

This can also be demonstrated by the road and building in the bakground, along with the facade of the closest building.

So now we know the real location the video was filmed from, we can look at the angles. The bearing from the camera to the hospital is around 304°. More notably, it is just to the left of the corner of the right-most close building. Exactly where it appears in the 6:59 video.

Meanwhile in the 7:59 video, the blast is around 1/3 of the way between that background building and the tower. At a bearing of around 297.5°. If we draw these bearings out as far as Gaza, it's obvious that the 7:59pm explosion we see is kilometres away from the hospital.

This is an example of the damage pseudo-OSINT analysis can do. Poor techniques used to 'confirm' an already-made-up-mind results in incorrect geolocation, incorrect chronolocation and completely wrong conclusions. And ends up being ammo for denialists and others.

FYI they deleted the tweet saying that the camera's clock was off by an hour, because that would mean the night-time footage wouldve been filmed before sunset. but here it is for posterity's sake.

Whoops, the geolocation tweet is gone too...

Also, the bearing towards the rocket fire in the 6:59pm video (above the left-hand-side of the 2nd-storey in the home in the background) gives a line that points almost directly at the IDF-claimed, radar detected, rocket launch site. Again proving this is video of that incident.

The whole thread has been nuked now since it was obviously wrong, but a number of other serial spreaders of disinformation are still spreading the video, so just keep an eye out.

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