By Shishir Prashant 
PrashantNews
The Taliban government in Afghanistan on Tuesday claimed that at least 400 people, most of them patients, were killed and 250 wounded in airstrikes launched by Pakistan in Kabul on Monday night.
Video footages on various news outlets showed large plumes of smokes emanating from a building which is said to be a hospital in the Afghan capital city after the airstrikes with people running for covers.
The border tension escalated last month with Pakistan saying Afghanistan was harbouring militants who attacked its territory, a claim denied by Kabul.
Afghanistan’s deputy government spokesperson Hamdullah Fitrat stated on X that the strike hit the Omar Addiction Treatment Hospital around 9 PM local time on Monday. The alleged Pakistani attack destroyed large sections of the 2,000-bed facility, with the death toll reaching 400 and roughly 250 others injured. Sharing a picture of a charred hand, presumably from the attack, Fitrat said on X: “The hospital of hope that turned into a slaughterhouse of dreams.”
However, Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s spokesman Mosharraf Zaidi dismissed the allegations as baseless, insisting no hospital was targeted in Kabul. Pakistan’s Ministry of Information said the strikes “precisely targeted military installations and terrorist support infrastructure” in Afghanistan.
Pakistan has been the Afghan Taliban’s closest friend for decades. It was Islamabad that helped give birth to the Taliban in the early 1990s after the USSR occupied much of Afghanistan a decade earlier.
Afghan cricketer Rashid Khan has also condemned the airstrikes on civilians. “I am deeply saddened by the latest reports of civilian casualties as a result of Pakistani airstrikes in Kabul. Targeting civilian homes, educational facilities or medical infrastructure, either intentional or by mistake, is a war crime. The sheer disregard for human lives, especially during the holy month of Ramadan, is sickening and deeply concerning. It will only fuel division and hatred. I call upon the UN and other human rights agencies to thoroughly investigate this latest atrocity and hold the perpetrators to account. I stand with my Afghan people in this difficult time. We shall heal, and we will rise as a nation. We always do. Inshallah,” Khan said on social media.