JAKARTA (Reuters) -Indonesia will convert a medical facility on its currently uninhabited island of Galang to treat about 2,000 wounded residents of Gaza, who will return home after recovery, a presidential spokesperson said on Thursday.
Muslim-majority Indonesia has sent humanitarian aid to Gaza after Israel started an offensive in October 2023 that Gaza health officials say has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, whether fighters or non-combatants.
“Indonesia will give medical help for about 2,000 Gaza residents who became victims of war, those who are wounded, buried under debris,” the spokesperson, Hasan Nasbi, told reporters, adding that the exercise was not an evacuation.
Indonesia plans to allocate the facility on Galang island, off its island of Sumatra and south of Singapore, to treat wounded Gaza residents and temporarily shelter their families, he said, adding that nobody lived around it now.
The patients would be taken back to Gaza after they had healed, he said.
Hasan did not give a timeframe or further details, referring questions to Indonesia’s foreign and defence ministries, which did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
The plan comes months after President Prabowo Subianto’s offer to shelter wounded Palestinians drew criticism from Indonesia’s top clerics for seeming too close to U.S. President Donald Trump’s suggestion of permanently moving Palestinians out of Gaza.
In response to Trump’s suggestion, the foreign ministry of Indonesia, which backs a two-state solution to resolve the Middle East crisis, said at the time it “strongly rejects any attempt to forcibly displace Palestinians”.
A hospital to treat victims of the COVID-19 pandemic opened in 2020 on Galang, which had been until 1996 a sprawling refugee camp run by the United Nations, housing 250,000 of those who fled the Vietnam War.
(Reporting by Stanley Widianto; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
