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JAKARTA: Indonesia has denied visas to Israeli gymnasts, costing them a spot in a world championship in Jakarta this month, a sports official in the Southeast Asian nation said on Friday, amid outcry over Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.
The Israeli team was set to participate in the World Artistic Gymnastics championship from October 19 to 25 in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, which has no formal diplomatic ties with Israel.
“They are confirmed to not be attending,” Ita Juliati, the chief of the Indonesian gymnastics federation, told reporters.
The Israel Gymnastics Federation did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
Indonesia decided not to issue visas to the Israeli athletes, senior legal affairs minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra said, citing objections from groups such as a council of Islamic clerics and the government in Jakarta, the capital.
The decision is in line with Indonesia’s policy of having no ties with Israel until it recognizes “the independence and full sovereignty of the state of Palestine,” Yusril added in a statement on Friday.
The most recent Israeli campaign in Gaza, which began in October 2023 over an attack by Hamas and has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians, according to health authorities in the enclave, has drawn criticism from Indonesia.
Israel launched the assault after Hamas-led militants stormed through Israeli towns and a music festival, killing 1,200 people and capturing 251 hostages.
A recent Instagram post from the Indonesian gymnastics federation drew hundreds of pro-Palestinian comments from domestic users, days after an Israeli association said it would attend the Jakarta event.
Under the government of President Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia has softened its Israel stance slightly.
The world must have an independent Palestine, but also recognize and guarantee the safety and security of Israel, Prabowo told last month’s session of the United Nations General Assembly.
It is not the first sports-related dispute between the two countries.
In March 2023, FIFA dropped Indonesia as host of the Under-20 World Cup, citing failure to honor its commitments, after a regional governor refused to host the Israeli team.
Last month, UN experts called for FIFA and the Union of European Football to suspend Israel as a country team from international football, as “a necessary response to address the ongoing genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory.”
Israel has dismissed accusations of genocide.

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump and his Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on Thursday promoted another fringe theory about autism — this time linking it to circumcision or to pain medication given for the procedure.
The claim was swiftly derided by experts who said the main study cited by proponents of this theory was strewn with errors and it was yet another example of Kennedy’s penchant for “pseudoscience.”
“Don’t take Tylenol if you’re pregnant and when the baby is born, don’t give it Tylenol,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting.
“There’s two studies that show children who are circumcized early have double the rate of autism,” chimed in Kennedy, adding: “It’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol.”
“None of this makes sense,” Helen Tager-Flusberg, a professor at Boston University and autism expert, told AFP.
“None of the studies have shown that giving Tylenol to babies is linked to a higher risk for autism once you can control for all the confounding variables,” she said.
Pregnant women are also advised by medical associations to take pain medication including acetaminophen — the active ingredient in Tylenol — in moderation when needed, contrary to Trump’s advice to “tough it out.”
While a few studies have suggested a possible association with acetaminophen in pregnancy, no causal link has ever been proven. The most rigorous analysis to date — published last year in JAMA and using siblings as controls — found no link at all.
As for the circumcision theory, the most widely cited paper, published by Danish researchers in 2015, was “riddled with flaws” that were pointed out by other scientists at the time, David Mandell, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told AFP.
Specifically, he said, the study relied on a tiny sample of Muslim boys circumcized in hospitals rather than at home — the dominant cultural practice.
Because those children were hospitalized, Mandell said, it was likely they were “otherwise medically compromised,” which could explain higher rates of neurodevelopmental disorders.
“A more recent review of studies in this area finds no association between circumcision and any adverse psychological effects,” he added.
Kennedy — a former environmental activist and lawyer who spent decades spreading vaccine misinformation before being appointed Trump’s health secretary — has made uncovering the root causes of autism a central focus, while cutting research grants in other areas.
He has hired vaccine conspiracy theorist David Geier, previously disciplined for practicing medicine without a license and for testing unproven drugs on autistic children, to investigate alleged links between vaccines and autism — a connection debunked by dozens of prior studies.