Ann K
Senior Member.
Your math is assuming free-fall. But a portion of a rocket that explodes could well be propelled downward at force by the explosion itself.
Was the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza hit by an Israeli airstrike or PIJ rocket?
- Thread starter Psychic
- Start date
For anyone who may want to do their own height calculations, here are some useful data. screenshots (minus my annotations on the first one) are from the associated press video, https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/1U8ILHWT. Google says its 4,890 ft from the camera to the Al Alhi hospital, and 988 ft from the camera to the Wafaa hospital. I did my own calculation to get a height, but i'm afraid my error bars for the visible part of the Wafaa hospital are too big to be very confident... maybe somewhere between 600 and 900 ft at this point in its ascent. it surely ascends to more than three times this height before it explodes. This is all assuming that the horizontal distance from the camera to the rocket is roughly that of the camera to the Al Ahli hospital. Given the israeli allegation is that it was launched at tel aviv (orthogonal to the line of site here) from very near the hospital itself, this seems ok i guess.
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Also please let me know if this intuition doesn't check out, but this is a shot of the mid-air explosion taken from just south of tel aviv, almost 40 miles from Al-Alhi hospital. Does that look like it's only a couple thousand feet in the air? To me that looks like it is waaay higher than I'm calculating, which would mean the object we're looking at is horizontally far far behind the hospital (from the perspective of the al jazeera camera). But I may be misjudging it-- i'm not a pilot or anything and i'm not practiced in eye-balling these things. i also dont have any numbers for the tel aviv perspective because, though ive located the buildings in the foreground, i still dont know where the camera is
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Ok sorry to spam this thread, but this makes absolutely no sense. If you watch this video i've time stamped
Source: https://youtu.be/yyNLvL_8SeY?si=F0lqbkj8HfXHdZau&t=128
, the black and white video at the bottom is filmed from the coast of Hamerkaz in tel aviv, like I said. Unless I am extremely confused, the lights along the coast in the distance can only be Ashdod and Ashkelon -- Gaza is almost completely dark. You can see the rocket originates from the *left* of those light! If you you look at a map, how does that even originate from inside the gaza strip?? IF those lights are Ashdod and Ashkelon, that object originates from well east of the hospital, probably from inside Israel, making the only plausible explanation that it's an iron dome interceptor, which incidentally are designed to explode in the air. What am I missing?
Source: https://youtu.be/yyNLvL_8SeY?si=F0lqbkj8HfXHdZau&t=128
, the black and white video at the bottom is filmed from the coast of Hamerkaz in tel aviv, like I said. Unless I am extremely confused, the lights along the coast in the distance can only be Ashdod and Ashkelon -- Gaza is almost completely dark. You can see the rocket originates from the *left* of those light! If you you look at a map, how does that even originate from inside the gaza strip?? IF those lights are Ashdod and Ashkelon, that object originates from well east of the hospital, probably from inside Israel, making the only plausible explanation that it's an iron dome interceptor, which incidentally are designed to explode in the air. What am I missing?
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Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
I've considered a hypothetical scenario in which the warhead was not involved: In this scenario a large part of the missile body impacted but the warhead was not attached to this part. The crater in the pavement may mark the spot where the missile body hit and skipped. Like an iron cannonball. A divot rather than a crater.
Fragments of the missile body and ejecta from the pavement caused the limited damage we see on certain structures around the divot.
Ejecta from kinetic impact:
Looking SW
Damage from low velocity fragments and pavement ejecta?
In the end, it was something to think about but I don't believe it. I think there was an explosive warhead. But it's a naive opinion, I have to acknowledge.
But certainly the rocket fuel would continue on in the direction of flight due to inertia. The burned cars are to the E, SE and NE.
I put in the yellow arrow. It points as close as I can get to due East.
Fragments of the missile body and ejecta from the pavement caused the limited damage we see on certain structures around the divot.
Ejecta from kinetic impact:
Looking SW
Damage from low velocity fragments and pavement ejecta?
In the end, it was something to think about but I don't believe it. I think there was an explosive warhead. But it's a naive opinion, I have to acknowledge.
But certainly the rocket fuel would continue on in the direction of flight due to inertia. The burned cars are to the E, SE and NE.
I put in the yellow arrow. It points as close as I can get to due East.
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kasparovitch
Active Member
@Null Do you mean that video was made from Tel Aviv, 65Km (40mi) away from Gaza?
For the blasts, all one can say is that there 3 ones: one in air at time 0 and two on ground at times 5.6sec and 7.28sec (+/-40msec). Whatever's the connection between them, if any, one can't say. The last one, and largest one, is supposed to be al-Ahli Hospital.
For casualties, I think that's an exaggeration. There might have been a panic reaction, of course, leading to an evacuation. Some casualties might happen here, but hard to believe they would be hundreds.
The only possible spot for direct casualties would be the parking lot. But there's absolutely no evidence there were any casualties there. I believe there were some of course. But how could it be there were hundreds of them scattered throughout the parking lot and absolutely no evidence.
All this started by an hospital destroyed by IDF ammunition. At this point, it's a fire in a parking lot at most.
For the blasts, all one can say is that there 3 ones: one in air at time 0 and two on ground at times 5.6sec and 7.28sec (+/-40msec). Whatever's the connection between them, if any, one can't say. The last one, and largest one, is supposed to be al-Ahli Hospital.
For casualties, I think that's an exaggeration. There might have been a panic reaction, of course, leading to an evacuation. Some casualties might happen here, but hard to believe they would be hundreds.
The only possible spot for direct casualties would be the parking lot. But there's absolutely no evidence there were any casualties there. I believe there were some of course. But how could it be there were hundreds of them scattered throughout the parking lot and absolutely no evidence.
All this started by an hospital destroyed by IDF ammunition. At this point, it's a fire in a parking lot at most.
@kasparovitch yes. if you look at the post i made before that i attached a map with an arrow to the "black and white" camera in southern tel aviv. I've located the buildings in the foreground of the video, but i think the camera itself must be on a drone.
Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
My bold. They wouldn't rush dead bodies to another hospital, so this must be intended to mean wounded.Yes.
Article: Ghassan Abu Sitta, a plastic surgeon working at al-Alhi, said the hospital was filled with internally displaced people seeking shelter from Israeli air strikes when he heard a loud explosion and the ceiling of his operating room collapsed.
“The wounded started stumbling towards us,” he wrote in an account posted to Facebook. He saw hundreds of dead and severely wounded people. “I put a tourniquet on the thigh of a man who had his leg blown off and then went to tend to a man with a penetrating neck injury,” he said.
People gather around bodies of Palestinians killed in the strike on al-Ahli hospital in central Gaza after they were transported to al-Shifa hospital on October 17, 2023. © Dadwood Nemer, AFP
Ambulances and private cars rushed some 350 casualties to Gaza City’s main hospital, al-Shifa, which was already overwhelmed with wounded from other strikes, said its director, Mohammed Abu Selmia. Doctors in the overwhelmed hospital resorted to performing surgery on the floor and in the halls, mostly without anesthesia.
I don't know if there were 250, 300 or 500 people killed, but it seems there was indeed widespread carnage.
And the pictures Israel's military is showing us don't explain that.
But much more importat: Hamas controls all media, including social media. The eyewitness story cited above can't be trusted. Would you trust a Russian social media story that's at odds with observed facts? Hamas is even less credible. The story about 350 wounded could be fantasy.
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Mendel
Senior Member.
Remember, "casualties" means dead or injured. Some journalists confuse this with fatalities, which is people dead.
Crater, impact damage, shrapnel damage to walls and roofs. People get hit by those flying shards, they'll bleed or worse. Expect that the grassy area was packed.
Israel wants to suggest that's all it was (burning cars), but that's not true.
Palestine wants to suggest that IDF deliberately bombed the hospital, but I don't think the evidence supports that, either.
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Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
Show evidence of that. There's no evidence. What we have are videos and stills of people casually wandering through the area.
I have found a single bit of evidence for what looks like a fatality. This is it.
That's here at the bottom of the stairs:
Show me more bloodstains, bodies, tissue splatter. Where's the evidence?
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Scaramanga
Senior Member
Which would not be aerodynamic pieces and would immediately meet with air resistance. And we need to have a piece remaining large enough to cause the destruction on the ground.....so the larger the mid-air explosion projecting pieces downwards the smaller those pieces would be.
And in any case, my point was that the difference between the height the rocket ought to be at after 11-15 seconds of constant rising, and any height required to cause an explosion on the ground just 6 seconds later ( even allowing for bits being projected ) is just too great to be explained away. The rocket explodes in the air, and then a mere 6 seconds later there is an explosion on the ground. Free fall dictates 600 feet or so. I don't accept that had the rocket been at 2400 feet ( for example ) when it exploded there'd be sizeable enough chunks hitting the ground within 6 seconds and accelerated by 4G or something.
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Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
Compare the site with the Kramatorsk railway station.
In a situation like this the wounded are taken away as quickly as possible. That takes all resources. Sometimes they leave bloody drag marks.
The dead are left behind. The blood and tissue are cleaned up days later. That's the reality of a civilian war zone.
Hours later. The crowd is gone. The wounded are gone. The dead and the blood remain.
We had a thread about this: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/kr...-denials-of-responsibility.12376/#post-269028
Here we see journalists with pro camera equipment.
We see shots of the crater from every angle. Lot's of burned cars. No charred remains inside the cars, though.
Wouldn't they be hunting for every dramatic scene? Every dead body. Every pool of blood. I've seen one such ugly scene at the bottom of those stairs.
They couldn't find any more such scenes? I suggest that's because there weren't any there to find.
There were 63 dead at Kramatorsk, but we're supposed to believe there were hundreds of fatalities at this site?
We're supposed to believe the roof of one of the hospital buildings was blown in by this explosion? Where?
Or did one of the panels fall off a false ceiling? Or did it happen at all?
In a situation like this the wounded are taken away as quickly as possible. That takes all resources. Sometimes they leave bloody drag marks.
The dead are left behind. The blood and tissue are cleaned up days later. That's the reality of a civilian war zone.
Hours later. The crowd is gone. The wounded are gone. The dead and the blood remain.
We had a thread about this: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/kr...-denials-of-responsibility.12376/#post-269028
Here we see journalists with pro camera equipment.
We see shots of the crater from every angle. Lot's of burned cars. No charred remains inside the cars, though.
Wouldn't they be hunting for every dramatic scene? Every dead body. Every pool of blood. I've seen one such ugly scene at the bottom of those stairs.
They couldn't find any more such scenes? I suggest that's because there weren't any there to find.
There were 63 dead at Kramatorsk, but we're supposed to believe there were hundreds of fatalities at this site?
We're supposed to believe the roof of one of the hospital buildings was blown in by this explosion? Where?
Or did one of the panels fall off a false ceiling? Or did it happen at all?
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Mendel
Senior Member.
Clothes and other objects strewn on the lawn in various pictures, as well as witness statements, I think quoted above.
Mendel
Senior Member.
Compare with the Boston Marathon bombing, a day later.
There was no investigation in Gaza, no crime scene. Just many helping hands to set things straight and to keep the horror at bay that you demand to see. And a much longer time for daylight and press photographs as it wasn't a public site.
Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
How a Qassam-type artillery rocket is made.
Apparently the more expensive and larger Iranian provided artillery rockets are bigger but just as crude.
We don't know exactly which rocket this was, but this gives us an idea of what may have gone wrong. The solid rocket fuel slug is inserted into a water pipe. The boost phase is very short - 1 to 5 seconds according to this video.
So here are some things to think about:
-I'm wondering if the propellant slug was mixed improperly and part of it burned too quickly. Could this have fractured the pipe (the rocket body) near the rear of the rocket body?
What happens next?
-Does the rear part of the rocket body continue upward with a partial slug of propellant still burning? Is this what we see in the sky throwing out light and sparks and eventually becoming unstable in flight? If the propellant were badly mixed, a residue could have continued to burn slowly, or it was burning slowly because it was not properly contained. There could have been just enough pressure to keep the lightened section under some kind of boost. Or maybe its just fizzling away.
-Does the top section of the rocket body, without stabilizing fins, continue on its way in an aerodynamically unstable trajectory? Unseen, because, while it still has part, or most, of the propellant slug intact inside, the propellant is not burning. Unstable because there are no fins.
-There might be two such fragments, which would explain the two visible ground explosions.
-These parts started falling as the tail fragment continued under boost. This would explain the vexatious issue of the estimated altitude of what we see in the sky versus the physics of falling objects. The timing issue discussed earlier in this thread.
The rocket may have broken up due to any number of other reasons. Maybe one or more fins fell off. It was unstable and started to tumble. Aerodynamic forces would fracture it. Maybe it fractured because it got caught up in the launching frame. Maybe it was already cracked.
In any scenario, a fragmentation of the rocket body during the short boost phase could serve to explain the two ground explosions and the timing issue.
Apparently the more expensive and larger Iranian provided artillery rockets are bigger but just as crude.
We don't know exactly which rocket this was, but this gives us an idea of what may have gone wrong. The solid rocket fuel slug is inserted into a water pipe. The boost phase is very short - 1 to 5 seconds according to this video.
So here are some things to think about:
-I'm wondering if the propellant slug was mixed improperly and part of it burned too quickly. Could this have fractured the pipe (the rocket body) near the rear of the rocket body?
What happens next?
-Does the rear part of the rocket body continue upward with a partial slug of propellant still burning? Is this what we see in the sky throwing out light and sparks and eventually becoming unstable in flight? If the propellant were badly mixed, a residue could have continued to burn slowly, or it was burning slowly because it was not properly contained. There could have been just enough pressure to keep the lightened section under some kind of boost. Or maybe its just fizzling away.
-Does the top section of the rocket body, without stabilizing fins, continue on its way in an aerodynamically unstable trajectory? Unseen, because, while it still has part, or most, of the propellant slug intact inside, the propellant is not burning. Unstable because there are no fins.
-There might be two such fragments, which would explain the two visible ground explosions.
-These parts started falling as the tail fragment continued under boost. This would explain the vexatious issue of the estimated altitude of what we see in the sky versus the physics of falling objects. The timing issue discussed earlier in this thread.
The rocket may have broken up due to any number of other reasons. Maybe one or more fins fell off. It was unstable and started to tumble. Aerodynamic forces would fracture it. Maybe it fractured because it got caught up in the launching frame. Maybe it was already cracked.
In any scenario, a fragmentation of the rocket body during the short boost phase could serve to explain the two ground explosions and the timing issue.
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Z.W. Wolf
Senior Member.
About the warhead in this video...
The video shows the explosive up front and the ball bearings in a separate section behind. That's apparently correct. The explosive is TNT and urea nitrate. The urea nitrate is there as an oxidative material to boost the TNT. It's a kind of amatol. Doesn't have the kick of TNT. The main point is that it's cheaper and stretches the limited supply of TNT.
I'm speculating that many of the pockmarks we see on this site were caused by fragments of pavement and rock thrown out by the explosive and possibly by the kinetic energy of the rocket body. I guess you can call this ejecta.
The video shows the explosive up front and the ball bearings in a separate section behind. That's apparently correct. The explosive is TNT and urea nitrate. The urea nitrate is there as an oxidative material to boost the TNT. It's a kind of amatol. Doesn't have the kick of TNT. The main point is that it's cheaper and stretches the limited supply of TNT.
I'm speculating that many of the pockmarks we see on this site were caused by fragments of pavement and rock thrown out by the explosive and possibly by the kinetic energy of the rocket body. I guess you can call this ejecta.
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There was also a southwest facing surveillance camera at the northern border of the strip. It doesn't even see the "rocket". You can see its perspective in this ap article if you scroll down to the video captioned "Video from an Israeli town just footsteps from the border wall shows a barrage of at least 17 rockets being launched from inside Gaza." Tbf the film cuts before the "rocket" *would* appear, but come on, that would be included if it were captured.
"rocket"https://apnews.com/article/israel-p...-rocket-gaza-e0fa550faa4678f024797b72132452e3
My assessment: It doesn't see it because it was fired from far east of its field of view. Ie from Israel.
You can also see the camera mentioned in this wall street journal video. Notice that after it's introduced, there is no mention at all of that camera's perspective or whether it might capture the object.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/is...-rocket-meant-for-israel-rP4uhNqD5MQoYryXxsvC
Someone please tell me how there's any reason to believe this object came from the gaza strip.
"rocket"https://apnews.com/article/israel-p...-rocket-gaza-e0fa550faa4678f024797b72132452e3
My assessment: It doesn't see it because it was fired from far east of its field of view. Ie from Israel.
You can also see the camera mentioned in this wall street journal video. Notice that after it's introduced, there is no mention at all of that camera's perspective or whether it might capture the object.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/is...-rocket-meant-for-israel-rP4uhNqD5MQoYryXxsvC
Someone please tell me how there's any reason to believe this object came from the gaza strip.
deirdre
Senior Member.
like the al jazeer video shows the barrage? why doesnt the al jazeer vid show the barrage?
The barrage originates quite far southwest from where the al jazeera camera is, and remember it is looking south east.
deirdre
Senior Member.
Nope! you can immediately see that is false from the Bat Yam Camera. It shows the first ground explosion (al jazeera claims it shows second, ie the hospital explosion, but i find it hard to make out), which is east of the hospital
ya fair point. although the "rocket" is the main attraction. id think theyd show as many perspectives on that as possible
deirdre
Senior Member.
that's the barrage one? yea it seemed too close.
deirdre
Senior Member.
deirdre
Senior Member.
what?! since when? is this new news?
deirdre
Senior Member.
you keep calling it different things
so the Tel aviv one. gottcha.yeah technically its south of tel aviv, in bat yam. or maybe thats a nbhd of tel aviv, idkyou keep calling it different things
deirdre
Senior Member.
oh we can see the barrage in the al jazeera video.
no those are airstrikes. the barrage doesnt even start until 18:59:20 or so
deirdre
Senior Member.
its complicated enough with all these weird names. you're not helping by changing names
deirdre
Senior Member.
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