This came out a few hours ago.
Between this and the Al Jazeera investigation from yesterday, I think it is fair to say that the people who were scolding everyone for jumping to conclusions too quickly also jumped to conclusions too quickly and acted like this was a settled matter.
edit: Sorry. When I started I had no idea it would get this long.
I've no idea about the veracity of the forensic architecture investigation, looks professional enough to a no mark like me, but I feel like I must comment on the Al-jazeera one. At first when I saw the Al-jazeera video I thought "oh, that sounds plausible, maybe I shouldn't have been so confident" but something seemed a bit off. Then, after a bit of digging, I concluded that the Al-jazeera investigation is much more likely to be propaganda with little in the way of explanatory power.
It's possible that this is motivated reasoning on the part of myself because I've already been convinced otherwise and spent a fair amount of time articulating why, but I don't think so. I don't think I'm that proud. Equally I don't enjoy feeling like a gaslit pawn in some sort of propaganda game so I've got a right bee in my bonnet about this one. I think people have to seriously consider the possibility that Al-Jazeera is lying to them, or is itself guilty of motivated reasoning. For what it's worth (not so much) here's what I'd consider major objections to Al-Jazeera's conclusions.
1. Not enough time (confidence level medium). The investigation postulates that the iron-dome shot down a missile in its launch phase when the iron-dome is, in fact, a terminal (descent) phase system. That is why videos of Iron dome activity seem to always
show interceptions ocurring between Gaza and Israeli cities rather than above Gaza itself.
Footage of interceptions taken from Gaza also seem to show them being intercepted over Israeli territory.
Here is a good article about how the iron dome works.
Here is another one. Basically, due to how the iron dome functions, its capabilities and its overall role it is distinctly improbable that there would have been enough time for the iron dome to triangulate, aim, fire and intercept the missile before it crossed into Israeli airspace.
2. Absence of visual confirmation (confidence level high). You can
see the iron dome interceptor missiles
quite clearly on all
night time videos of them in action, right up to the moment of explosion unless it is above the clouds. There is no visual evidence of an interceptor missile at all on the hospital video.
3. Where are the Gazan rockets (confidence level medium-high)? In all the above videos you can see the interceptor missiles, but you can't see what they're intercepting. This is because interception occurs later in the missile life cycle, after its propellant has been used. As you can see in the original Al-jazeera footage, the missile fuel there is still very much ignited at the point of termination. See the video attached to point 3.
4. No comment on change of direction (confidence level high). The Al-jazeera investigation skips over the fact that the Gazan rocket abruptly changes direction mid flight. This change in direction does not have an accompanying explosion (which it would if it were the point of an iron dome interception). What caused this deviation in the rockets path? Why did the investigation decide to omit an explantion? I would contend that this deviation is most plausibly explained via an internal malfunction of the rocket. Here is a video of the whole incident to show you what I mean:
5. No explanation for propellant discharge (confidence level high). The Al-jazeera footage fails to account for the discharge of what is clearly propellant after the deviation in direction and before the moment of interception/explosion. Iron dome rockets work via explosion so could not have been the cause. What caused the fuel leak prior to the explosion? Again I would contend that this discharge is most plausibly explained via an internal malfunction of the rocket. Again refer to the above video to see what I mean.
6. The conclusion that the missile suffered "total destruction" (confidence level low). Now, I don't know exactly what you can safely read into analysis of a camera designed to see in the visible spectrum, but as someone who's fairly familiar with editing and post production techniques in a professional capacity I'm fairly confident in telling you that I could swiftly derive an image that looks similar to the one they produced while having absolutely no confidence that it would portray anything useful As far as I can see the video plays at being able to see into the ultra violet, despite this not being a capability of the original camera. What they've done is played with inversions and curves and farted around with a purple filter to highlight some amorphous blobs. It looks good, but it's turning bright lights purple and outlining them in orange. I think you can see what you want to see in something like this. Here's someone else with a completely different perspective seeing something else. What is it that appears to be falling down at 11 seconds? I have no clue
6. The general tenor of the piece (confidence level low-medium). Now this might just be personal taste, and stuff like dispatches does the same sort of nonsense but I'm unconvinced by the dramatic voice and spooky background music invoking drama in what is supposed to be a factual video. It is a rhetorical trick usually used when someone is attempting to convince rather than explain.
7. Sundry observations (confidence level low). At the point at which the investigation says that Israel's iron dome is intercepting rockets on the cam from "south of Tel Aviv" you can notice that these interceptions already seem to be appearing simultaneously with the launch of Gazan rockets. This seems odd. You also note that the Gazan rockets themselves are only visible for a few moments. Compare that to the rocket over the hospital. That rocket is visible for a lot longer, and is more meandering and slower in its movement. This suggests to me something is wrong in and of itself. Going back to the explosions you can also see that the initial lights in the sky are a lot smaller and indeed last a lot longer than the explosion above the hospital. Although quite a bit different in size and longevity the voice over asserts that the hospital explosion "has the same afterglow seen in previous interceptions." Again this feels rhetorical rather than explanatory.
All told my feeling is that the piece was not a good faith attempt at a best guess, but more likely a piece of propaganda aimed at being plausible to a general audience already predisposed to believing (or wanting to believe) in a specific culprit.
I still think it's just too much of an astonishing coincidence to have a clearly malfunctioning rocket explode right above the hospital with just enough of a time gap to fall to the floor before the ground explosion occurs.
Occam's razor just has to come into play here. On the one hand we have an exquisitely timed malfunctioning rocket. On the other we have a malfunctioning rocket intercepted in record time by an invisible iron dome missile while an independently launched artillery shell lands at precisely the same moment in the hospital below causing precisely the same damage as would be expected from a malfunctioning rocket igniting its unspent fuel.
The second explanation is just too much of an inexplicable confluence of unlikely events.
