Videos shot by AFP at the hospital the next day show charred cars in the parking lot.
Next to the parking lot, a lawn could be seen strewn with clothes and personal belongings and stained with blood, an apparent sign that people were there.
Many windows in the surrounding buildings are broken.
On the ground, apparent impact marks could be seen, including at least one small crater.
According to Gaza authorities, the site housed hundreds of wounded and sick people, and civilians who had sought refuge.
“We were operating, there was a strong explosion and the ceiling collapsed in the operating room. It’s a massacre,” said Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah of Medecins Sans Frontieres.
“People were scattered outside in the gardens and under the trees. Suddenly everything went black, with bodies and blood everywhere,” Gaza resident Mohammed Qriq told AFP.
“For fear of bombing we came here,” Waleed, another resident, said, referring to the hospital.
“We felt like a rocket hit it, the whole place was bombed. We headed to other places nearby. The bodies were in pieces, old people, children, women.”
POSSIBLE CAUSES
On social networks, commentators have clashed over the possible cause of the explosion. Some back Israeli authorities, who have pinned the blame on a misfired rocket aimed at Israeli territory by the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad from near the hospital. Others wonder if a strike by the Israeli air force was possible.
Analysts interviewed by AFP remained cautious, preferring not to rule out any scenario.
However, analysts say that a regular Israeli strike might be unlikely, pointing to the limited damage to the buildings surrounding the parking lot and the absence of a large crater that some Israeli weapons can leave.
“It is difficult to make a link between the strong explosion on the ground (seen in the Al-Jazeera video) and the minor damage observed at the hospital,” said Heloise Fayet, a researcher at the French Institute of International Relations.
“It seems that the hospital itself has not been affected,” said Fayet. She pointed out that the blast mostly affected the parking lot, the nearby lawns and the facades of the buildings.
Few images show the interior of the buildings.
The researcher said that a rocket hitting gas tanks of several cars at the hospital was “the most likely hypothesis”.
The visible damage “is consistent with the hypothesis of engine pieces, for example, of a rocket, which fall in a ballistic alignment, projecting debris, flaming materials, and creating a blast effect”, said Joseph Henrotin, editor-in-chief of the journal Defense and International Security (DSI).
“There is damage to the buildings,” he said, pointing to torn tiles, broken windows and impact marks on the walls.
However “no building has been hit directly”, he said.
“If you target a building with the ammunition and targeting capabilities available to the Israelis, normally you hit this building,” he added.
Henrotin pointed to “very small craters”.
“What blew up there is not huge,” he said, adding that the damage was not consistent with the weapons used by Israel.
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