Summary
We’re going to end our live coverage here, but will return if there is breaking news to bring you. Here’s a summary of the latest updates:
The death toll from India’s strikes in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir overnight on Wednesday has risen to 31. Pakistan army spokesperson Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said 57 others were injured from the strikes. Among the dead are several children, Pakistani officials have said. Indian missiles struck a mosque in the city of Bahawalpur in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, as well as near Muridke in Punjab and Kotli in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said India must “suffer the consequences” of its attack. Sharif, in a televised address to the nation on Wednesday evening, called the Indian attack “cowardly”, adding: “Perhaps they thought we would retreat – but they overlooked the fact that this is a nation built on courage.”
Pakistan’s defence minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, said his country is “trying to avoid” a full-fledged war with India, but said India’s attack marked an “invitation to expand the conflict”.
India said its overnight strikes targeted nine sites of “terrorist infrastructure” inside Pakistan. The Indian defence ministry said the strikes were in response to an attack targeting Hindu tourists in Indian Kashmir last month that killed 26 people.
Pakistan called the strikes an “act of war” and claimed it had shot down five Indian air force jets. Pakistan has also denied that any of the sites hit by Indian missiles had been associated with terrorist infrastructure.
Indian and Pakistani troops engaged in heavy exchanges of fire on the line of control throughout the night. A senior Indian defence source told CNN that 12 people were killed and 57 injured in overnight shelling by the Pakistani military on the Indian side of the line of control, the de facto border that divides disputed Kashmir. Pakistan reported that at least five people had been killed from shelling on their side of the line.
The US, UK, China, Iran and UAE all called for a swift de-escalation of the conflict. The British prime minister, Keir Starmer, said the UK was “engaging urgently with both countries … encouraging dialogue, de-escalation and the protection of civilians”.
Donald Trump called for India and Pakistan to halt their fighting, saying: “I want to see them stop. We get along with both countries very well, good relationships with both, and I want to see it stop.”
Where did India strike?
India’s army said it destroyed nine “terrorist camps” in Pakistan in the early hours of Wednesday, two weeks after Delhi blamed Islamabad for backing an attack on tourists in the Indian-administered side of disputed Kashmir - a charge Pakistan denies.
The Indian army said the strikes had targeted camps for two Islamist militant groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, which have long been accused of freely operating out of Pakistan and have been implicated in some of India’s deadliest terror attacks.
“We killed only those who killed our innocents,” said India’s defence minister, Rajnath Singh. The Indian army described the missile strikes as “not escalatory, proportionate and responsible”.
Pakistan said that the “unprovoked and unjustified attacks martyred innocent men, women and children”, and denied the existence of any terrorist camps or infrastructure in the areas struck by India. Officials have said at least 31 civilians had been killed and 46 wounded in the strikes.
Bahawalpur
The largest Indian strike was on an Islamic seminary near the Punjab city of Bahawalpur, killing 13 people, according to the Pakistan military.
The seminary was emptied of its students in recent days as speculation grew that it would be targeted by India, but the family of Masood Azhar, the founder of the Jaish-e-Mohammed Islamist militant group, was still there, according to the group.
Ten of Azhar’s relatives were among 13 people killed in the strike, including women and children, the Pakistani military said.
Pakistan banned Jaish-e-Mohammad in 2002 after it, along with Lashkar-e-Taiba, was blamed for a 2001 attack on India’s parliament. The group had links with al-Qaida, founded by Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban, the UN security council has said.
Muridke
Further north, four Indian missiles hit a sprawling complex in Muridke over six minutes, a local government official said. The attack demolished a mosque and adjacent administration building and buried three people in the rubble.
A sign outside the facility describes the site as a government health and educational complex, but India says it is associated with militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). Delhi and Washington blame LeT for the 2008 attack on the Indian city of Mumbai that killed more than 160 people.
A local official said that normally there were up to 3,500 staff and students at the site, but almost everyone had been evacuated in recent days as they feared it would become a target.
The conflict between India and Pakistan has been confined in recent decades mostly to the disputed mountainous region of Kashmir. But the air strikes in the towns of Bahawalpur and Muridke were seen in Islamabad as a major escalation.
Muzaffarabad
In Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani administered Kashmir, an Indian strike badly damaged a mosque-seminary in the heart of the city. Five missiles killed three people in the two storey structure, which also had residential quarters, locals said.
Reuters journalists saw the roof and walls of the concrete building crumbled under the impact of the strikes and household items scattered on the first floor. An Indian source said the mosque was actually a “terrorist camp”, which Pakistan denies. Pakistan has said all targets were civilians.
