The Israeli military said on Tuesday that a deadly attack on a Gaza hospital a day earlier was intended to destroy an observation camera that it said had been placed in the area by Hamas militants.
But the military did not provide evidence for that claim. The location that was hit was regularly used by news media outlets for livestreaming.
The strike on Monday on Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis killed at least 20 people, five of them Gaza-based Palestinian journalists, according to the Gazan health ministry. The military said in a statement on Tuesday that it had identified six of the dead as Palestinian militants.
Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, described the six men as “terrorists,” including one who infiltrated Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the day Hamas led the attack that set off the war in Gaza.
Hamas, the militant group that has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, rejected the Israeli claims as a “false narrative.”
The military’s statement did not suggest that the six men had been intended targets in the Israeli strike or that the attack had been aimed at killing militants.
The military’s explanation on Tuesday, however, was a departure in tone from the initial Israeli assessments on Monday, when the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a rare expression of regret, said the civilian deaths had been the result of a “tragic mishap.”
The military statement said that an initial internal inquiry had determined that troops from the Golani infantry brigade operating in Khan Younis “identified a camera that was positioned by Hamas in the area of the Nasser Hospital that was being used to observe the activity of Israel Defense Forces in order to direct terrorist activities against them.”
The military cited what it described as “intelligence confirming Hamas’ use of the Nasser Hospital to carry out terrorist activities” since the start of the nearly two-year war in Gaza. It said the troops “operated to remove the threat by striking and dismantling the camera.”
Videos verified by The New York Times show that multiple journalists and news agencies regularly filmed at the location at Nasser Hospital that Israel struck and operated cameras from there.
The Hamas government’s media office asserted in a statement on Tuesday that the camera that was the target of the attack was not a surveillance camera but rather belonged to Hussam al-Masri, a photojournalist who was broadcasting live to media outlets from the hospital location and was killed in the initial strike.
The military statement did not provide evidence that the camera had been placed there by Hamas or was being used to monitor troops. It also did not address evidence from witnesses and video footage that a first strike was followed minutes later by a second that hit the same part of the hospital after rescue workers and journalists rushed to the site.
Most of the journalists were killed in the second strike, along with rescue workers, hospital staff and patients, according to Hamas, hospital officials and videos of the attacks and their aftermath.
The attack, which struck the facade of a hospital building with an exterior staircase, was one of the deadliest for members of the news media, who have been killed in unusually high numbers while covering the war in Gaza.
Almost 200 journalists have been killed since the fighting began, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which expressed dissatisfaction with the results of the military’s initial inquiry.
“We have seen the statement released by the Israeli authorities on the attack at Nasser Hospital in Gaza,” Sara Qudah, the committee’s Middle East and North Africa regional director said. “Many important questions remain unanswered, including what steps the armed forces took to protect civilians at the hospital — including journalists — ahead of the attack,” she added.
The five journalists had worked for news outlets that included Reuters, The Associated Press and Al Jazeera, according to their employers.
In a joint letter sent by The A.P. and Reuters to Israeli officials on Monday, the agencies said they had found the Israeli military’s “willingness and ability to investigate itself in past incidents to rarely result in clarity and action.”
Reuters streamed footage from an upper floor of the exterior staircase at Nasser Hospital, which overlooked much of Khan Younis. The agency livestreamed from the staircase in the past week.
The Associated Press also operated a camera at the same location in August. Videos filmed by Palestinian journalists show that this location was used by journalists to shoot photos and videos as early as January 2024.
Video published by Reuters and other news agencies shows several individuals digging in the rubble shortly after the first strike, including one who holds up what Reuters identified as a camera and a LiveU unit, used to transmit live video.
The producer credited for the Reuters livestream that day — which cut out roughly at the time of the first strike — was Mr. al-Masri, a contractor for Reuters who was killed. Aftermath footage verified by The New York Times shows wounded individuals being taken into the hospital, and a tripod on a mound of rubble.
The military released the names and portraits of the six men it described as “terrorists eliminated during the strike,” but did not provide any details or evidence of their affiliations with armed groups.
It did not name Mr. al-Masri as one of the six.
It described four of the six as members of Hamas and a fifth as a member of Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group operating in Gaza. The sixth man was merely described as “a terrorist who infiltrated into Israeli territory” on Oct. 7, 2023.
The Hamas media office denied that any militants had been killed at the hospital and said that two of the men named by the military had been killed in two separate attacks in different locations outside the hospital compound.
Mr. Netanyahu’s office had suggested that the civilian deaths were the result of a military blunder. “Israel deeply regrets the tragic mishap that occurred today at the Nasser Hospital,” his office said in the statement on Monday. “Israel values the work of journalists, medical staff and all civilians,” it added.
The military did not specify what kind of munitions had been used in the attack and said that General Zamir had called for further examination of the strike authorization process, including the ammunition approved for it.
Aaron Boxerman, Sanjana Varghese and Christoph Koettl contributed reporting.
Isabel Kershner, a Times correspondent in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990.
Aric Toler is a reporter on the Visual Investigations team at The Times who uses emerging techniques of discovery to analyze open source information.
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