Afghan officials say a Pakistani airstrike on a Kabul hospital for drug users has killed as many as 400 people and injured about 250. Hamdullah Fitrat, Afghanistan’s deputy government spokesman, posted on X that Monday night’s strike destroyed large sections of the facility, and rescue teams were trying to control fires and recover bodies. Local television footage showed firefighters working amid the ruins.
Pakistan has denied striking a hospital, saying its raids in Kabul and eastern Afghanistan targeted military installations and militant infrastructure. The Pakistani Ministry of Information said the strikes were aimed at technical equipment and ammunition storage used by Afghan Taliban and Pakistan-based militants in Kabul and Nangarhar, and described Afghan claims that civilian sites were hit as false and misleading.
Afghanistan’s Health Ministry spokesman, Sharafat Zaman, said in an interview shared on X that the drug treatment hospital was largely destroyed and initially reported more than 200 dead. Government spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid condemned the strike as a violation of Afghan territory and said patients made up most of the casualties. A spokesman for Pakistan’s prime minister rejected the allegations as baseless.
The reported hospital strike came amid intensifying cross-border exchanges along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, which have entered a third week. Afghan provincial officials said mortar shells fired from Pakistan struck villages in Khost province and destroyed homes. Pakistan said a mortar fired from Afghanistan hit a house in Bajaur district, killing four members of a family and wounding two others, including a five-year-old. Islamabad has repeatedly said its military targets Afghan posts and militant hideouts, not civilians.
The clashes have included multiple Pakistani airstrikes on Kabul. Pakistan’s president has accused Afghanistan’s Taliban administration of crossing a red line by deploying drones that injured Pakistani civilians. Pakistan also reported airstrikes on equipment storage and technical support infrastructure in Kandahar that it said were being used in attacks inside Pakistan. Kabul acknowledged two sites were hit, describing one as an empty security site and saying a drug rehabilitation center suffered minor damage.
Afghanistan’s administrative deputy prime minister, Abdul Salam Hanafi, said defending sovereignty is a duty of all citizens, expressed regret over civilian casualties and called the fighting an imposition on Afghanistan. The recent escalation began in late February after Afghanistan launched cross-border attacks in response to earlier Pakistani strikes that Kabul said killed civilians, ending a Qatar-brokered ceasefire that had been in place since October.
The U.N. Security Council called on Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to intensify efforts to combat terrorism and unanimously adopted a resolution condemning all terrorist activity while extending the U.N. political mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) for three months. Pakistan accuses Kabul of harboring the Pakistani Taliban and other militants; Afghan authorities deny providing safe haven.
Casualty figures claimed by each side differ sharply. Pakistan’s information minister has said its military killed 684 Afghan Taliban fighters, a number rejected by Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government as inflated. Afghan officials have asserted they killed more than 100 Pakistani soldiers. The conflicting claims underscore the difficulty of independently verifying losses amid the continuing cross-border fighting.
