At least three civilians were killed, including a child, after Indian armed forces fired missiles at nine sites in Pakistan, which New Delhi described as “precision strikes at terrorist camps.”
The attack comes after weeks of spiraling tensions on the South Asian subcontinent, with Pakistan accused earlier of a terrorist strike on the Indian-administered part of the contested region of Kashmir.
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International leaders were quick to condemn the strikes, calling for an immediate end to hostilities and saying the world can not afford another conflict, with wars dragging on in Ukraine and Israel.
Earlier this week, various news sources reported that Pakistan was running low on artillery shells after selling stockpiles of them to Ukraine and, reportedly, Israel in order to help close budget gaps. The majority-Muslim nation, a natural ally of Palestine, denied the reports that it sold 155mm artillery shells to Israel, and Islamabad repeated its historic opposition to the existence of the State of Israel and its refusal to recognize it diplomatically.
According to Indian news sites this week, Pakistani ammunition factories reported dangerously depleted levels of artillery shells after selling some $364 million worth of them to Ukraine between February and March 2023. Pakistan is said to have shipped about 42,000 122mm rockets for Grad BM-21 systems, 60,000 155mm howitzer shells, and an additional 130,000 122mm rockets to Kyiv.
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Islamabad claimed that a child was killed in Tuesday’s attack and vowed that the strikes would not go unanswered.
“We have confirmed reports of three civilians killed that includes one child,” Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif told AFP.
Pakistan’s military said that the five locations included three in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and two, Bahawalpur and Muridke, in the country’s most populous province of Punjab.
“We will retaliate at the time of our choosing,” said Pakistani military spokesman Lieutenant-General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, calling the strikes a “heinous provocation”.
AFP reported that the Pakistani military said it launched two missile tests in recent days, including of a surface-to-surface missile with a range of 280 miles, about the distance from the Pakistan border to New Delhi. The news agency reported that India was set to hold several civil defense drills Wednesday preparing people to “protect themselves in the event of a hostile attack”.
New Delhi earlier in the weeks had said that an April 22 attack on tourists in Kashmir last month that killed 26 people was carried out by gunmen from Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba, a UN-designated terrorist organization, something Islamabad has denied. The victims were mostly mainly Hindu men in the tourist hotspot of Pahalgam.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India would “identify, track and punish every terrorist and their backers.”
Asked about the strikes, US President Donald Trump said, “It’s a shame, we just heard about it… I guess people knew something was going to happen based on the past. They’ve been fighting for many, many decades and centuries, actually, if you really think about it.”
The two countries have been at odds over the disputed territory since the 1947 partition of India that created the state of Pakistan but left between 12 and 20 million people displaced and divided along religious lines in Kashmir.
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