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NEW DELHI: India’s military chief Gen. Anil Chauhan has confirmed for the first time that the Indian Air Force lost jets in clashes with Pakistan in May.

Earlier this month, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said his country shot down six Indian jets, an assertion that Delhi had refrained from commenting on.

Chauhan, chief of defense staff of the Indian Armed Forces, is the first Indian official to make the most direct admission over the fate of the country’s fighter jets during the conflict that erupted on May 7.

“What is important is that, not the jet being downed, but why they were being downed,” Chauhan told Bloomberg TV in an interview on Saturday, while attending the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.

“The good part is that we are able to understand the tactical mistake which we made, remedy it, rectify it and then implement it again after two days and fly all our jets again, targeting at long range.”

Pakistan’s claims of shooting down six Indian combat aircraft were “absolutely incorrect,” Chauhan said, without specifying how many jets India lost.

India and Pakistan recently saw their worst clashes in half a century, during which both sides traded air, drone and missile strikes, as well as artillery and small arms fire along their shared border.

It was triggered by a gruesome attack on tourists near the resort town of Pahalgam in Indian Kashmir on April 22, in which 26 people — 25 Indians and one Nepali citizen — were killed.

Bharat Karnad, an emeritus professor for National Security Studies at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, said that the Indian Air Force may have underestimated its Pakistani counterpart.

“Initially, Indians were surprised. Maybe they underestimated the capacity of the Pakistani Air Force,” Karnad told Arab News on Saturday.

“I think what was surprising was that India did not use the airborne early warning (and) control system, the NETRA, which Pakistan has used very well,” he said. “I’m not sure how much the Indian Air Force expected this kind of tactical innovation. So, this is something that the Indian Air Force realized very quickly.”

According to Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak, a retired officer of the Indian Air Force, Pakistan benefited from its Chinese-made weapons during the early May conflict.

“This brings us to the lessons which underscore that India was not fighting Pakistan on one front but two countries: Pakistan and China,” Kak told Arab News.

“Every single superior technology, capability, operationally and tactically, or in strategic terms, are made available to Pakistan. That must concern us: What kind of force structure we must have and what kind of capabilities we must build against the combo.”

JAKARTA: Indonesian civil society organizations are urging the international community to hold Israel accountable for its attacks on Gaza, as Tel Aviv’s latest military onslaught on the besieged enclave pushed the territory’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse.

All hospitals in northern Gaza were out of service as of Friday, according to Jakarta-based NGO Medical Emergency Rescue Committee, which funds the Indonesia Hospital located in the Gazan city of Beit Lahiya.

Al-Awda Hospital — the only remaining facility providing health services in north Gaza — evacuated its patients on Thursday following orders from the Israeli military, which launched a wave of new attacks earlier this month across the Gaza Strip, killing hundreds of people and forcing most public facilities in the area to close.

“Even after various condemnations and warnings, Israel the colonizer continues to commit crimes across the Gaza Strip,” said Dr. Hadiki Habib, chairman of MER-C’s executive committee.

“MER-C’s stance is in line with the Indonesian constitution, in which we do not recognize colonization in any shape or form … Israel’s colonization and crimes against humanity (in Gaza) must be held accountable at the international level.”

Indonesia is a staunch supporter of Palestine, and sees Palestinian statehood as being mandated by its own constitution, which calls for the abolition of colonialism.

The Indonesia Hospital was one of the first targets hit when Israel began its assault on Gaza, in which it regularly targets medical facilities.

Attacks on health centers, medical personnel and patients constitute war crimes under the 1949 Geneva Convention.

Israel’s latest offensive comes after a two-month blockade on the enclave after Tel Aviv unilaterally broke a ceasefire with the Palestinian group Hamas in March.

It is a continuation of Israel’s onslaught of Gaza that began in October 2023 and has killed more than 54,300 Palestinians and wounded more than 124,000. The deadly attacks have also put 2 million more at risk of starvation after Israeli forces destroyed most of the region’s infrastructure and buildings and blocked humanitarian aid.

Aid only recently began to enter the besieged territory, although only in limited quantities.

“The suffering of the people is massive due to starvation, and there is limited aid because of the blockade,” Habib said. “A humanitarian crisis must not be used as a transactional tool. Stop this war and open the food blockade in Gaza. We will continue to voice this demand.”

Various scholars and human rights organizations have said that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, including Amnesty International and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention.

“Zionist Israel’s crimes in Gaza must be held accountable. They must be put on trial and punished for genocide. There is no longer doubt that their crimes constitute genocide,” Muhammad Anshorullah, who heads the executive committee of the Jakarta-based Aqsa Working Group, told Arab News on Saturday. “Netanyahu’s regime must be arrested, tried and punished, just like how the Allied powers arrested, tried and punished Nazi elites through the Nuremberg Trials. There is nothing more urgent globally aside from stopping the genocide in Gaza.”