Pakistan and India traded accusations of attacks on May 8, as tensions persisted amid the worst flare-up of fighting between the nuclear-armed neighbors in more than 20 years.
Lieutenant General Ahmad Sharif, a Pakistani military spokesman, said that a civilian was killed in Sindh Province and four soldiers were wounded in Lahore as a result of Indian drone strikes.
The media wing of the military said that Pakistan shot down 25 drones using a mix of technical and weapons-based countermeasures.
India’s Defense Ministry said it targeted air defense systems in several locations after Pakistan launched a drone-and-missile attack overnight, but did not say whether India's forces used drones.
"Pakistan attempted to engage a number of military targets...using drones and missiles," the ministry said in a statement. It said the weapons were "neutralized" by India's air defense systems.
The fighting this week follows an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir last month that killed 26 Hindu tourists and that India blamed on Pakistan, which denied it had anything to do with the killings.
India said it carried out “precision strikes” early on May 7 against nine Pakistani sites that were "terrorist infrastructure" from which attacks against it were orchestrated.
Pakistani officials have said that those strikes killed 31 civilians, some of them children.
On May 7, Pakistani Prime Minister Shebaz Sharif vowed retaliation and an emergency meeting of the National Security Committee concluded with a decision authorizing the country's military to respond.
It said that India had "ignited an inferno in the region.”
There were also deaths and injuries on both sides of the border in heavy exchanges of fire that followed the initial Indian strikes.
India’s Foreign Ministry said on May 8 that 13 civilians were killed and 59 wounded during exchanges of fire across the border on May 7, and the army said an Indian soldier was also killed by shelling. Pakistani officials said six people have been killed near the border in exchanges of fire over the past day.
Since the partition of British India in 1947, India and Pakistan have fought three full-scale wars -- in 1948, 1965, and 1971 -- and a limited conflict in 1999 known as the Kargil War.
There have also been several flare-ups in the century that have sparked fears of a full-scale war, including fighting that ensued after a suicide bomber killed 40 Indian security personnel in Indian-administered Kashmir in February 2019.
The partition, along religious lines, triggered one of history’s largest mass migrations, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands in sectarian violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.
This latest escalation in the conflict has sounded alarm bells in Washington, where US President Donald Trump said he has been informed of the situation and hopes the fighting "ends very quickly."
On May 8, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Sharif and stressed the need for India and Pakistan to work closely to deescalate their conflict, the Pakistani prime minister's office said in a statement.
Both the EU and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres have also expressed concern about the situation surrounding Kashmir and called for maximum restraint.
