Jakarta denies its Palestine hospital atop terrorist tunnels
IDF says a Hamas rocket launch pad is near the Indonesian-funded hospital in north Gaza
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IDF says a Hamas rocket launch pad is near the Indonesian-funded hospital in north Gaza
Jakarta denied on Tuesday Israel's claim that a hospital built in Gaza using Indonesian funding sits atop a network of Hamas tunnels and is located near a launchpad for rocket attacks.
"The Indonesian Hospital in Gaza is a facility built by the Indonesian people entirely for humanitarian purposes and to serve the medical needs of the Palestinian people in Gaza," Indonesia's foreign ministry said in a statement Tuesday.
The statement came a day after Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said the Indonesian Hospital, situated in the north of the Gaza Strip near the fortified border with Israel, had been built at a site that sat on top of a network of Hamas tunnels.
"Here, the IDF (Israel Defense Force) identified a launch pad, meaning they launch rockets from here," Hagari said in a video statement posted by the IDF on YouTube, pointing to what he said was photographic evidence of his claim.
Sarbini Abdul Murad, chief of the Indonesian charity MER-C that operates the hospital, said in Jakarta on Monday, "What Israel accused us of can be a precondition for them to launch an attack at the Indonesian hospital in Gaza."
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Hamas has repeatedly denied Israeli accusations that hospitals and other civilian infrastructure are being used by its operatives.
Israel has for a month relentlessly pounded the besieged Gaza Strip in its war on Hamas, after the militant group launched a cross-border attack on 7 October, killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians.
Gaza death toll
The health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip announced on Monday that the death toll from Israel's ongoing bombardment of the Palestinian enclave had exceeded 10,000 people, majority of which have been civilians, including 4,000 children.
The dead also include more than 2,600 women while more than 25,000 people have been injured, according to the ministry.
Health ministry spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qudra, on Monday, the 31st day of the war, said that at least 292 Palestinians were killed overnight in intense Israeli bombing and accused them of "perpetrating 19 massacres in the last few hours."
The health ministry also said that more than 2,600 women were killed and more than 25,000 people have been injured.
Martyrs database
To prove the credibility of their figures, on 26 October, the Gaza health ministry published a list of nearly 7,000 names, all people whom it said had been killed in the war up to that point.
The list included the sex, age and identity number of each person killed.
It explained in an accompanying document that in governmental hospitals, which fall under Hamas's governance, the personal information and ID number of each killed Palestinian is entered into a computerized database after the body arrives or after they succumb to their wounds.
This data is then transmitted daily to the "central register of martyrs" at the health ministry.
If the dead are taken to a private hospital, their personal information is recorded on a special form which is sent "within 24 hours" to the health ministry, which then adds the details to its central database.
The ministry said that a dedicated information center verifies the data provided by both types of hospitals before it is entered into the database to ensure it "does not contain duplicates or errors."
