Morning Update: Hundreds feared dead in Gaza hospital explosion amid conflicting accusations

Good morning,
The brutal conflict in the Middle East is in its 12th day, and saw the bloodiest single incident in Gaza since the war started. An explosion at the Al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital in Gaza City killed hundreds of people and it remains unclear who is responsible. Follow our live coverage here.
U.S. President Joe Biden is in Israel today and expressed solidarity with the Jewish people. He offered an assessment that the hospital explosion appeared to have been carried out “by the other team” and not the Israeli military. Biden’s planned summit with Arab leaders was called off.
The Gaza Strip’s Hamas-controlled government said yesterday’s bombing was an Israeli air strike and had killed more than 500 people. The Israeli military, however, blamed the blast on a failed missile launch by the Islamic Jihad group.
Photos and videos on social media showed a huge fire in the courtyard of the hospital after the explosion, with dozens of dead and injured scattered around, including children. In addition to patients and doctors, the hospital was sheltering an estimated 5,000 displaced people, who had abandoned their homes across Gaza amid the Israeli bombardment. They were gathered in the hospital courtyard, believing that medical facilities would not be bombing targets.
Meanwhile, thousands of people trying to escape Gaza are gathered in Rafah, which has the territory’s only border crossing to Egypt.
Open this photo in gallery: An injured person is assisted at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, October 17, 2023.STRINGER/Reuters
Canadian father wants to get his five children out of Gaza, but evacuation still impossible
Mansour Shouman desperately wants to get his five children out of Gaza. For him, yesterday was the worst day of his life.
He said he saw 100 bodies leave the hospital, wrapped in white sheets, bound for a graveyard. He describes seeing children asking the corpses of their parents to wake up and widows weeping on dead husbands. This was all in one day.
“The bombing was relentless today, the most successive bombing I have seen,” said Shouman, who, up until last year, lived in Calgary and worked at PwC, the accounting and consulting firm, as well as several oil and gas companies. During a video call with The Globe and Mail, he proudly held up his Canadian passport and talked of earning an engineering degree at Queen’s University, followed by an MBA at the University of Calgary.
Today he sits in circumstances he can only describe as hell. The Shoumans are subsisting off briny well water, lentils and rice. His children, who range in age from 4 to 16, are hysterical and depressed as they wait for the world to open the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt so they can escape. But, so far, evacuation from Gaza remains impossible.
Peacemakers in Israel coming to difficult conclusion that negotiations with Hamas are futile
Gershon Baskin has had a long career as a peacemaker, but now, for the first time, the 67-year-old paragon of the Israeli left realizes that there is no use negotiating with Hamas.
That was a difficult realization for Baskin, one of the architects behind the scenes of the hopeful peace processes of the 1990s. His first reaction after Oct. 7 was to reach out in an unofficial capacity to his contacts in Hamas, which he had built up over decades, to persuade them to release some or all of the 199 hostages. His Hamas contacts wouldn’t budge; instead, they crowed about the “victory” they had achieved over the Israeli military.
Now, Baskin believes, talks between Israel and the Palestinians can only resume once Hamas is removed from the equation.
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Open this photo in gallery: Illustration by David Parkins
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Moment in time: Oct. 18, 1935
Open this photo in gallery: Picture of Nick Schaak.Lori Krei/Handout
Protester dies of injuries sustained during Regina Riot
In April of 1935, about 1,000 single, homeless, unemployed men left Vancouver, atop boxcars, headed to Ottawa to protest Canada’s relief policies. The On-to-Ottawa Trek gained momentum as it headed eastward, only to be stopped in Regina by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who forcibly raided a public rally in support of the movement on July 1, 1935. The police action provoked a riot with hundreds of injuries, tens of thousands of dollars in damage, and one official death: Detective Charles Millar. But there was a second, forgotten fatality. Nicklas John (Nick) Schaack, a 52-year-old unemployed farmhand from Watertown, S.D., had joined the trek in Regina. The night of the riot, an RCMP constable confronted a rock-armed Schaack, struck him about the head, and took him into custody. By the time of his mid-July trial, Schaack, confined to his cell bed, had trouble eating and standing. He was eventually sent to the Regina General Hospital on Aug. 25 – the same day rioting charges were dropped. In early October, the hospital superintendent informed Schaack’s family that he was unlikely to recover and that if he did, he would be transferred to the Weyburn mental hospital. He died on this day in 1935. Schaack was quietly buried in the Regina cemetery. His grave lies within sight of the headstone of the other riot victim, Detective Millar. Bill Waiser
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