How to Make a Hospital Disappear: The Role of OSINT in the Aftermath of the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital Bombing

“We’re functioning […] in the Information Age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they have not even arrived in the Pentagon” –Donald Rumsfeld on the release of photographs from Abu Ghraib

OSINT analysis of the strike (Forensic Architecture)

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a means of collecting information from public sources. OSINT mapping, in which public information is georeferenced to a particular place and time, is an OSINT technique that has gained greater notoriety from recent conflicts such as the war in Ukraine and the Gaza genocide, as well as from institutions such as Bellingcat and Forensic Architecture. Much of the existing literature on OSINT comes from the fields of computer science or security studies, but the fields of geography and planning have not yet encountered the technique nor unpacked its methodological and theoretical assumptions (Puyvelde & Rienzi, 2025). Using the case study of the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital Massacre of 17 October 2023, this paper will examine how OSINT is deployed as a strategy for asserting informational superiority, the competing claims that are made with information derived from OSINT methods, and the ultimate impact of OSINT on the spatial imaginary of the war in Gaza (Watkins, 2015; Jacobs, 2021). Ultimately, the paper argues that claims made using OSINT-derived information had a negligible impact on the trajectory of the conflict because of the inability of institutional media to digest such information with added context from Palestinian sources on the ground, raising questions about the efficacy of such approaches in shaping the overall discourse.

OSINT practices trace their genealogy through two distinct fields. The first is that of security and espionage, where it is understood as a tool of information collection along the same lines as human intelligence or signals intelligence. The second is the field of human rights, where it is understood as a way to collect evidence of human rights abuses that can be used to enforce international law. How do these fields, their logics, and the habitus of the actors within them influence how OSINT is viewed and practiced (Bourdieu, 1990)?

The open source nature of OSINT practices has enabled it to take on a democratized and counter-hegemonic flavor in public discourse. Exponents of the practice are frequently not affiliated with any formal institution, and publicly available training courses promote the idea that any sufficiently savvy internet user can adopt and apply open source information gathering methods. However, “sensationalist claims about OSINT’s revolutionary potential confuse the availability of open data with the production of intelligence” (Puyvelde & Rienzi, 2025:2). This ambivalent stance on OSINT is indicative of how the field of security studies understands the practice. There are four primary objections to the practice within this field. First, it is distinct from traditional collection disciplines such as human intelligence or signals intelligence on the basis that it is not secret but rather must be filtered from publicly available information. Second, the field denotes intelligence not based on how it was collected, but rather what it will be used for; e.g. whether it is useful to decisionmakers. Third, whereas most collection disciplines require the cultivation of assets that produce a small amount of intelligence, the challenge with OSINT is finding the useful information in the context of the abundant amount of information available on the web (Miller, 2018). Finally, intelligence practitioners note that contrary to the popular imaginary of OSINT as practicable by everyone, the selection, interpretation and analysis of publicly available information requires subject matter expertise.

Each of these concerns must be understood at least partially as the product of logics that permeate security scholars and practitioners. The requirement that intelligence contribute to a “decision advantage” for policymakers, for example, is a criterion that only makes sense in the context of institutions that have more ways of acting on the world than the mere production and dissemination of information, e.g. states (Sims, 1995). Likewise, the interpretation of OSINT as exceptional in a context of covert intelligence production betrays the institutional gaze of state intelligence agencies rather than that of newspapers or civil society actors. Discursively, the logics by which security studies encounters and interprets OSINT practices serve to position the field “inside a larger political and social space [where it makes] truth claims on the basis of knowledge and know-how” (Bigo 2005:22). As the epigraph to this paper indicates, security institutions have an interest in excluding certain kinds of information production from legitimacy. Still, the problems of filtering and interpretation raised by security studies constitute valid obstacles that OSINT practitioners must overcome or mitigate.

Meanwhile, the human rights field typically positions itself as critical of and in opposition to state interests. Lacking the resources and legal standing to perform covert surveillance, organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Forensic Architecture use OSINT under a broader framework of open source information (Dubberley et. al, 2020). The cross purposes of using OSINT to hold states to account for alleged human rights abuses versus using OSINT as part of a strategy to manage unease and produce “solutions” to manage that unease mean that its use in public discourse can signify either support or critique of state priorities (Bigo, 2005). The Donald Rumsfeld quote leading this piece is illustrative of this tension, and of the clear discomfort state actors have with these capabilities in the hands of human rights advocates. However, it should be noted that both instances of OSINT affirm institutional approaches to change, and both deploy it as part of a broader repertoire of information gathering.

How does the use of OSINT in the news cycle around the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital Bombing shed light on its role in the construction of discourses and spatial imaginaries? The event is significant because its interpretation became the model for how reporting on strikes on humanitarian infrastructure would be understood. This is not to say that every such strike would receive the same level of attention; rather, the conclusion that the fog of war makes assignment of blame for such incidents impossible became the default wisdom, and the balance of evidence was resolved in favor of the Israeli narrative. Thus, in terms of the consequences of the strike and the second order impact on the discourse around the war mark the moment that the conflict escalated from a war to a genocide (Forensic Architecture, 2024).

On the night of 17 October 2023 amidst the first evacuation orders of North Gaza, a strike with ambiguous origin struck the parking lot of Al-Ahli hospital where hundreds were sheltering. Official casualty rate information indicated that 471 were killed and 342 injured. Palestinian groups attributed the explosion to an Israeli strike, but the Israeli military claimed it was caused by a misfiring rocket launched from Gaza by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This dispute initiated a news cycle in which the responsibility for the explosion was debated heavily, with OSINT analysis relied upon for evidence. Many significant news organizations used open source investigation methods to reconstruct the scene (Toler et al., 2023; Murphy et al., 2023; Biesecker, 2023).

An Israeli press conference presents an alleged call between Hamas members (Channel 4)

Over the course of the following weeks, a trickle of evidence would cause these stories to update, although most news organizations gravitated around an interpretation in favor of the Israeli narrative within 48 hours of the attack. The key planks of these assessments were video footage of the strike, photo analysis of the site, and an alleged audio recording of Palestinian fighters attributing the explosion to a misfired rocket produced by Israel. Subsequent retrospective assessments confirmed the conclusion that Palestinian sources on the ground were not telling the truth about the attack, and that “the hospital explosion offers reason to apply particular skepticism to Hamas’s claims about civilian deaths — which are an undeniable problem in this war” (Leonhardt, 2023).

The analysis of videos of the strike demonstrate the advantages of open source investigations in such investigations, whereas the exclusion of expert medical testimony on the ground reveal its limitations.

Four days after the strike, unaffiliated OSINT analyst Oliver Alexander successfully debunked two pieces of video evidence relied upon by US and Israeli intelligence and the news media as unrelated to the strike on Al-Ahli, stimulating a slew of corrections (Alexander, 2023; Neimen Lab, 2023). The speed with which this new analysis was incorporated is a testament to the potential for open-source investigators to contribute to the public’s understanding of such scenarios.

However, the limitations of conducting OSINT analysis at a distance are also at play. The conflation of the Palestinian medical establishment with Hamas and subsequent invalidation of medical sources on the ground in Gaza was already taking root in the early days of the conflict, following classic orientalist tropes (Said, 1979). The effect of this is that Palestinian victims of and witnesses to the strike are not considered valid sources of journalistic information, and their exclusion is not mentioned or justified in most mainstream analyses. Military experts, OSINT analysts, and even evidence produced by a belligerent military were granted legitimacy by their mere inclusion in analyses of Al-Ahli, while the testimony of medical experts like Ghassan Abu Sitta was not solicited or included.

Abu Sitta’s testimony is particularly important in that it explains inconsistencies at the blast site that OSINT and military experts used as evidence that the blast was caused by a misfired rocket. Of particular concern to these analysts was the small size of the crater and surrounding damage that was inconsistent with a typical high-explosive payload from an Israeli bomb (Murphy et al., 2023). However, both the kind of injuries sustained by the victims and the markings on the surrounding buildings from shrapnel are consistent with a low-explosive fragmentation bomb (Forensic Architecture, 2024). Abu Sitta’s credentials in this matter are indisputable, having provided medical care in Gaza during several previous attacks on the strip (Allaw, 2023) and yet his testimony is not reflected in reporting on the aftermath of the attack.

CNN coverage of the strike (CNN)

The emphasis on analysis at a distance and expert testimony from westerners is partially enabled by a conception of reporting on conflict events as primarily a forensic exercise that affirms Eurocentric rationality (Quijano, 2000). The epistemologies embedded in the fields of security, human rights, and journalism, in privileging forensic knowledge production such as OSINT, are not equipped to understand an event like the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital Massacre (Human Rights Watch, 2023). Instead, the narratives and visualizations they created were a form of “cartographic representation [that], in addition to identifying itself with reality in an immediate and absolute manner, decides, precisely by virtue of this identification, what exists and what does not, and therefore what is legitimate to think about” (Farinelli, 2022: 27).

With major journalistic and humanitarian sources in agreement that despite uncertainty the balance of evidence favored the Israeli narrative, subsequent attacks on humanitarian infrastructure were granted less scrutiny, with Israeli sources frequently awarded the benefit of the doubt. As public interest in and attention towards the conflict waned, Al-Ahli came to stand in as the paradigmatic example of the untrustworthiness of Palestinian sources in the documentation of their own extermination.

Works Cited

Allaw, S. (2023, December 13). Ghassan Abu Sitta: The Healing Hero of Gaza. Legal Agenda. https://english.legal-agenda.com/ghassan-abu-sitta-the-healing-hero-of-gaza/

Balousha, H., George, S., Dadouch, S., Loveluck, L., & Coletta, A. (2023, October 17). Strike on Gaza hospital kills hundreds, Palestinian officials say, as Biden departs for Israel visit. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/17/israel-hamas-gaza-un-war/

Beiseker, M. (2023, November 22). New AP analysis of last month’s deadly Gaza hospital explosion rules out widely cited video. https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-hospital-rocket-gaza-e0fa550faa4678f024797b72132452e3

Bigo, D. (2005). Globalized (in)Security: The Field and the Ban-opticon.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1990). “The Logic of Practice”. Polity Press.

Farinelli, F. (2022). Cartography and Spatial Production of Society. In The Politics of Mapping (pp. 25–46). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119986751.ch2

Forensic Architecture. (2024, October 17). “When It Stopped Being A War”: The Situated Testimony Of Dr Ghassan Abu-sittah ← Forensic Architecture. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/when-it-stopped-being-a-war

Human Rights Watch. (2023, November 26). Gaza: Findings on October 17 al-Ahli Hospital Explosion. https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/26/gaza-findings-october-17-al-ahli-hospital-explosion

Leonhardt, D. (2023, November 3). Revisiting the Gaza Hospital Explosion. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/briefing/gaza-hospital-explosion.html

Mackintosh, P. P. M., Katie Polglase,Benjamin Brown,Gianluca Mezzofiore,Eliza. (2023, October 21). CNN Investigates: Forensic analysis of images and videos suggests rocket caused Gaza hospital blast, not Israeli airstrike. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/21/middleeast/cnn-investigates-forensic-analysis-gaza-hospital-blast/index.html

Miller, B. H. (2018). Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): An Oxymoron? International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 31(4), 702–719. https://doi.org/10.1080/08850607.2018.1492826

Murphy, P., Polglase, K., & Brown, B. (2023, November 3). CNN Investigates: Forensic analysis of images and videos suggests rocket caused Gaza hospital blast, not Israeli airstrike. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/21/middleeast/cnn-investigates-forensic-analysis-gaza-hospital-blast

Neiman Lab. (2023). The New York Times offers a limited mea culpa for how it initially presented news of the Gaza hospital blast. Nieman Lab. Retrieved March 29, 2025, from https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/10/the-new-york-times-offers-a-limited-mea-culpa-for-how-it-initially-presented-news-of-the-gaza-hospital-blast/

Oliver Alexander [@OAlexanderDK]. (2023, October 21). The video in the bottom right is taken from a camera in Bat Yam (32.020230, 34.739322). It shows both the initial explosion immediately after the rocket barrage at timestamp: 18:59:22 followed by the launch of the Tamir interceptor at 18:59:24 and hospital explosion at 18:59:44. Https://t.co/fFC8LMQ5re [Tweet]. Twitter. https://x.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1715859568608104643

Puyvelde, D. V., & Rienzi, F. T. (2025). The rise of open-source intelligence. European Journal of International Security, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2024.61

Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), 215–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0268580900015002005

Sam Dubberley, Alexa Koenig, & Daragh Murray. (2020). Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation, and Accountability: Vol. First edition. OUP Oxford. http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=2451737&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Watkins, J. (2015). Spatial Imaginaries Research in Geography: Synergies, Tensions, and New Directions. Geography Compass, 9(9), 508–522. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12228