The office of the prime minister of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif, has said that the country’s armed forces have been authorised to undertake “corresponding actions” after India’s strikes, Reuters reports.
India attacked Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir on Wednesday night, in the worst fighting between the two nuclear-armed nations for decades. Pakistan claimed to have downed five Indian planes during the attack. Indian defence ministry officials have not confirmed the figure.
India said it hit nine targets which it described as “terrorist infrastructure”. Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri told a briefing “Intelligence and monitoring of Pakistan-based terror modules showed that further attacks against India were impending, therefore it was necessary to take pre-emptive and precautionary strikes.”
Islamabad said six Pakistani locations were targeted, and that none of them were militant camps. At least 26 civilians were killed and 46 injured, a Pakistan military spokesperson said. JeT said in a statement on Wednesday that 10 relatives of its leader Masood Azhar were killed in an Indian attack.
Indian police and medics have said at least seven civilians were killed and 30 others wounded by retaliatory Pakistani firing and shelling overnight.
The attacks come weeks after 26 tourists were killed by militants in Pahalgam.
Countries including Russia and China have called for calm and deescalation between the two nations. A UK minister has said his government is ready to help both sides to deescalate.
CNN reported that the strikes have put the region on alert, with commercial airlines keeping almost entirely clear of Pakistani airspace, flight-tracking website Flightradar24 showed. The airport in Srinagar has been closed to civilian traffic, and several airlines have suspended or diverted flights to Pakistan and northwest India.
