Now that the New York Times has issued something that sort of looked like a correction, though not an apology over their front-page coverage of the explosion at the al-Ahli hospital, in Gaza City, we can get down to a serious investigation of what really happened there. Or so you would have thought. After all, something clearly came down in the hospital’s parking lot, damaging the pavement and some cars. So allowing an independent group of journalists and weapons experts to examine the remnants from the site should clear things up in a reasonable amount of time. But that’s not on the Hamas agenda, apparently. You see, there are no remnants from the alleged missile or rocket. They’ve simply vanished or, as the Free Beacon describes it, they were “conveniently vaporized.” There’s literally nothing to see here so it will apparently remain a mystery shrouded in the passage of time.

Hamas, which has claimed without evidence that Israel is behind the blast at a Gaza hospital that the terrorist group said left hundreds dead, says any remnants of the munition can’t be examined because they vanished entirely.

“The missile has dissolved like salt in the water,” Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas official, told the New York Times on Sunday. “It’s vaporized. Nothing is left.”

After Ahli Arab hospital was hit by a weapon last week, Hamas immediately blamed Israel and claimed the blast left more than 450 people dead. Israel, however, provided evidence, including the lack of structural damage at the hospital and intercepted Hamas communications, that indicates the blast was caused not by an Israeli airstrike but by a misfired rocket from the Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad.

So the Hamas spokesman is peddling two different “explanations” here. The first is that there are no remnants of the rocket because it “dissolved like salt in the water.” We can leave aside for the moment the fact that those ad hoc missiles are generally made out of pipes or similar construction materials and they tend to be made of metal. Metal is not famous for “dissolving like salt” unless you happen to have a blast furnace, and even then it would cool and harden back to the original material for the most part.

In nearly the same breath, however, the Hamas government media office scolds that they are not “obligated to present the remnants of every rocket that kills our people.” So are there remnants or aren’t there? The office went on to say that, in general, “you can come and research and confirm for yourself from the evidence we possess.” Which evidence would that be? The evidence that you claim dissolved like salt and no longer exists in this world?

Then there is the matter of the casualties. Hamas originally reported that “at least 500 were killed” when Israel supposedly destroyed the still-standing hospital. The number has since been reduced to 471. That’s still a considerable number of deaths and it’s only been a few days. Where are the bodies? Were there hundreds of hastily planned funerals that nobody managed to capture on film? Or did the bodies similarly “dissolve” into thin air? Does it strike anyone else as odd that nearly 500 random people would have been hanging out at the far end of a hospital parking lot at that time of day? Based on the photographs of the area and the small number of cars that were damaged, those had to have been the 471 unluckiest people on the face of the planet.

Without further evidence being presented, we are likely going to be left with the story as it currently stands. It’s a virtual certainty that it was not an Israeli missile that struck the parking lot. The damage would have been far greater. Given how many violent maniacs of various stripes are wandering around the Gaza Strip, we can’t say with certainty that it was a poor-quality rocket produced by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but they’re the most likely suspects. And the death toll was grossly exaggerated to put it mildly, assuming anyone was killed at all.

This was a random missile failure/explosion in a war zone and Hamas decided to try to jump out ahead of the story and score some PR points. The “press release” they put out was a work of fiction, but it was quickly and eagerly snapped up by the New York Times and most of the rest of the legacy media. They ran with the story based on the word of a terrorist group with no further examination or investigation. We’re finally getting to the bottom of it many days later, but it’s too late. The damage has already been done. The lies of Hamas made it around the world before the truth was able to lace up its boots, and those lies are still being repeated at rallies across the United States by people waving Palestinian flags and sporting swastikas. Sadly, this all should have been preventable, but the game is afoot on the left and you have to seize your opportunities where you can, I suppose.