Rescuers search rubble of Kabul hospital hit by strike blamed on Pakistan

Rescue crews were still digging bodies out of the rubble of a drug rehabilitation hospital in the Afghan capital on Tuesday morning, after officials said an overnight Pakistani airstrike killed at least 400 people.

It was a dramatic escalation of a conflict between the two neighbours that is now in its third week.

Pakistan rejected Afghanistan’s accusation that it targeted a hospital, insisting its strikes, which were also conducted in eastern Afghanistan on Monday, were aimed at military facilities.

It dismissed Afghanistan’s claims of hundreds of casualties from a strike on a hospital as propaganda.

The casualties were taken to several hospitals in the area.

It was not immediately possible to independently confirm the death toll.

The conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan began in late February, and has seen repeated cross-border clashes as well as airstrikes inside Afghanistan.

International calls for a ceasefire have gone unheeded.

The strike came hours after Afghan officials said that the two sides exchanged fire along their common border, killing four people in Afghanistan.

Pakistan accuses Afghanistan of providing a safe haven for militants who frequently carry out attacks inside Pakistan, especially for the Pakistani Taliban, a group separate but closely allied with the Afghan Taliban who took over Afghanistan in 2021 in the wake of the chaotic withdrawal of US-led troops.

The group, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, is designated as a terrorist organisation by the United States.

Kabul denies the charge.

In a late-night post on X, Afghanistan’s deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat said the airstrike had hit the Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital, a 2,000-bed facility in Kabul, at about 9pm local time.

He said that large sections of the facility had been destroyed, and that the death toll had “so far” reached 400 people, while about 250 people had been reported wounded.

There was no updated official death toll on Tuesday morning.

Local television stations posted footage on X showing security forces using flashlights as they carried out casualties while firefighters struggled to extinguish flames among the ruins of a building.

The Omid hospital was renamed and expanded in size roughly a year ago from the Ibn Sina Drug Addiction Treatment Hospital.

The site, near Kabul’s international airport, is located beside a former Nato military base, Camp Phoenix, where US forces used to train the Afghan National Army.

After the Taliban seized control of the country in 2021, the base was taken over by Afghanistan’s new authorities.

It was not immediately clear what was now housed on the site of the former base.

Pakistan’s Information Ministry said in an X post that the Pakistani military had “precisely targeted” Camp Phoenix, which it said was now a “military terrorist ammunition and equipment storage site”.

However, it said that the hospital was “multiple kilometres” away from the former camp and accused Afghan officials of lying.

Google Maps also shows another location, east of Kabul city, also labelled as Camp Phoenix.

“Another important question also lingers, as to why would an alleged drug rehabilitation facility be co-located with lethal ammunition storage site in a military camp? This also remains unanswered,” the Information Ministry wrote.

Afghan government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid condemned the strike on X, accusing Pakistan of “targeting hospitals and civilian sites to perpetrate horrors”.

He said those killed were “innocent civilians and addicts”.

“We strongly condemn this crime and consider such an act to be against all accepted principles and a crime against humanity,” he said in a separate post on X.

A member of the rescue team working at the site on Tuesday morning, Allah Mohammad Farooq, said that hundreds had been killed.

“When we arrived here, everyone was buried under the rubble,” he said.

“We then used a crane to pull them out.

“Most of the people were dead, and many are still trapped under the debris.”

In Islamabad, information minister Attaullah Tarar rejected Afghanistan’s accusations that its airstrike had targeted a hospital as “entirely baseless”.

Mr Tarar said in a statement that the “Afghan Taliban regime is peddling yet another falsehood” and that Pakistan had only engaged military and militant targets.

He said that Pakistan had targeted facilities “being directly or indirectly used to plan, facilitate, shelter, train or abet terrorist attacks inside Pakistan”.

Mr Tarar said that overnight strikes in Kabul and in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar were “precise, deliberate and professional” and denied that any civilian infrastructure was hit.

“No hospital, no drug rehabilitation centre, and no civilian facility was targeted,” he said.