India said early Wednesday that it had conducted strikes on Pakistan, two weeks after more than two dozen civilians were killed in a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir.
The Indian government said its forces had struck nine sites in Pakistan and on Pakistan’s side of the disputed Kashmir region. Pakistani military officials said at least eight people were killed and 35 others wounded after six places were hit in Punjab Province and its part of Kashmir.
At least two aircraft were reported to have gone down in India and the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir. But Pakistan’s claims to have shot down Indian aircraft, including some of its newest fighter jets, were still unconfirmed.
While India in recent years has struck Pakistan-administered Kashmir and areas close to it during periods of rising tensions, the attack on Wednesday on Punjab, in Pakistani territory outside the contested region, represented an escalation in the conflict between the two nuclear-armed countries.
After the attacks, India was bracing for a response from Pakistan, its neighbor and nemesis for more than seven decades. The two nations have fought several wars, the most recent in 1999, and have edged to the brink more than once since then. As tensions have sharpened again, global leaders have warned of potentially dire consequences if the two sides fail to de-escalate.
India said on Wednesday that it had struck Pakistan after gathering evidence “pointing towards the clear involvement of Pakistan-based terrorists” in last month’s attack on civilians in a tourist area in Kashmir. It said that its military actions had been “measured, responsible and designed to be nonescalatory in nature.” It added that it had targeted only “known terror camps.”
In its own statement on Wednesday, the Pakistani government called the Indian strikes “an unprovoked and blatant act of war” that had “violated Pakistan’s sovereignty.”
Pakistan said it would respond at “a time and place of its own choosing.” Pakistani military officials said they had begun a “measured but forceful” response.
Indian officials and news channels said at least one aircraft had gone down on the Indian side of Kashmir. A second aircraft was reported to have been downed in the Indian state of Punjab, according to Indian news reports and a witness account.
Analyzing witness photos from one wreckage site, in the village of Wuyan in India-administered Kashmir, a weapons researcher identified the debris as an external fuel tank for a plane. The analyst, Trevor Ball, of Armament Research Services, said the tank was likely from a Rafale or Mirage fighter jet, both of which are made by the French manufacturer Dassault Aviation and used by India. Mr. Ball could not confirm whether the tank had come from an aircraft that had been hit by enemy fire.
Pakistani military officials claimed, without providing proof, that their forces had downed several Indian aircraft, including Rafale jets, which are among the newest and most advanced in India’s air force.
Indian officials and residents in the areas of Uri and Poonch, on the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir, reported that Pakistani shelling since the cross-border strikes had killed at least three people, wounded at least 10 and damaged several houses.
Manoj Sinha, the lieutenant governor of India’s Kashmir region, said he had ordered that villagers be moved to safer locations.
At the White House, President Trump called the escalation between India and Pakistan “a shame.”
“We just heard about it,” he said of the Indian strikes. “They’ve been fighting for a long time. I just hope it ends very quickly.” Shortly after the strikes, the Indian national security adviser, Ajit Doval, briefed Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the military actions, according to Indian officials.
A spokesman for the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, called for restraint from the two sides, adding, “The world cannot afford a military confrontation between India and Pakistan.”
But the scale and nature of the attacks by India are likely to provoke a “significant retaliation” by Pakistan, said Asfandyar Mir, a senior fellow in the South Asia program at the Stimson Center in Washington.
After attacks against Indian security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir in 2016 and 2019, India conducted more limited strikes in Pakistani-controlled territory. But this time, India “has crossed two significant thresholds in its military action” by hitting a large number of sites in Pakistan and striking the Pakistani heartland in Punjab, Mr. Mir said.
As India prepared for potential retaliation by Pakistan, military officials said that all of the country’s air-defense units along the border had been activated, India’s public broadcaster reported. Airlines said that several airports, including the one in Srinagar, the capital of the Indian side of Kashmir, had been closed to civilian travel.
The precise nature of Wednesday’s strikes — whether they involved missiles fired from India or Indian fighter jets crossing into Pakistan — was unclear. The Pakistani military said that Indian planes did not enter Pakistan’s airspace in conducting the attacks.
Residents of Muzaffarabad, the capital of the Pakistani part of Kashmir, reported hearing jets flying above. They said that a site in a rural area near Muzaffarabad that was once used by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group based in Pakistan, appeared to have been targeted in the strikes.
A spokesman for the Pakistani Army said that five other places had also come under attack.
They included Bahawalpur, in Punjab Province, Pakistan, the site of a religious seminary associated with Jaish-e-Mohammad, another Pakistan-based militant group; Kotli and Bagh in Pakistan-administered Kashmir; and Shakargarh and Muridke in Punjab. Lashkar-e-Taiba is believed to have a presence in Muridke
Indian forces are calling their military operation Sindoor, a reference to the red vermilion that Hindu women wear in their hair after marriage. It refers to the gruesome nature of the terrorist attack two weeks ago, in which many wives saw their husbands killed in front of them.
“Victory to Mother India,” Rajnath Singh, India’s defense minister, wrote on X.
In the April 22 attack, militants opened fire on tourists in the Indian-administered region of Kashmir, killing 26 and injuring more than a dozen others.
The massacre was one of the worst attacks on Indian civilians in decades, and India was quick to suggest that Pakistan, its neighbor and archenemy, had been involved. The two countries have fought several wars over Kashmir, a region that they share but that each claims in whole.
The Pakistani government has denied involvement in the attack, and India has presented little evidence to support its accusations. Still, soon after the onslaught, India announced a flurry of punitive measures against Pakistan, including threatening to disrupt the flow of a major river system that supplies it with water.
In Kashmir, Indian forces began a sweeping clampdown, arresting hundreds, as they continued their hunt for the perpetrators. And India and Pakistan have repeatedly exchanged small-arms fire along the border in the days after the attack.
The strikes by India on Wednesday are an intensification of the conflict. The Pakistani government earlier vowed to respond in kind to any Indian aggression, and both nations have the capacity to inflict tremendous damage.
India has long accused Pakistan of fomenting separatist violence in Kashmir, a scenic and ethnically diverse valley in the Himalayan mountains. Kashmir’s fate was left undecided in 1947, when the British divided India, its former colony, into two countries — Pakistan, which has a Muslim majority, and India, made up mostly of Hindus.
Soon after, Kashmir’s Hindu monarch, who at first had opted to keep the Muslim-majority region independent, ceded to India as Pakistan sent a military force to occupy parts of his territory. Currently, both nations administer a portion of Kashmir while claiming it as a whole, with Kashmiris having little say.
Since a war between the two nations over the region in 1999 and a rise in separatist insurgency, Kashmir has remained one of the world’s most militarized areas. The countries have repeatedly come to the brink of war since then, including in 2019, when a bombing in Kashmir killed at least 40 Indian soldiers.
That bombing, which was claimed by the militant Islamist group Jaish-e-Mohammed, prompted an Indian airstrike inside Pakistan, and an Indian jet was shot down. Tensions between the countries eased when Pakistan released the pilot.
Reporting was contributed by Anupreeta Das, Zia ur-Rehman and Aric Toler.
