LAHORE: India fired attack drones into Pakistan on Thursday, killing at least two civilians, the Pakistani military said. India, meanwhile, accused its neighbor of attempting its own attack, as tensions soared between the nuclear-armed rivals.
India acknowledged that it targeted Pakistan’s air defense system, and Islamabad said it shot down several of the drones. India said it “neutralized” Pakistan’s attempts to hit military targets. It was not possible to verify all of the claims.
In Indian-controlled Kashmir, meanwhile, residents of the city of Jammu reported hearing explosions and sirens late Thursday. Shesh Paul Vaid, the region’s former director-general of police, said there was a complete blackout in Jammu following loud explosions. “Bombing, shelling, or missile strikes suspected,” he wrote on social media.
The exchanges came a day after Indian missiles struck several locations in Pakistan, killing 31 civilians, according to Pakistani officials. New Delhi said it was retaliating after gunmen killed more than two dozen people, mostly Hindu tourists, in India-controlled Kashmir last month. India accused Pakistan of being behind the assault. Islamabad denies that.
Both sides have also traded heavy fire across their frontier in disputed Kashmir, and Pakistan claimed it killed scores of Indian soldiers. There was no confirmation from India.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif vowed to avenge the deaths in India’s missile strikes, raising fears that the two countries could be headed toward another all-out conflict. Leaders from both nations face mounting public pressure to show strength and seek revenge, and the heated rhetoric and competing claims could be a response to that pressure.
The relationship between countries has been shaped by conflict and mutual suspicion, most notably in their dispute over Kashmir. They have fought two of their three wars over the Himalayan region, which is split between them and claimed by both in its entirety.
With tensions high, India evacuated thousands of people from villages near the highly militarized frontier in the region. Tens of thousands of people slept in shelters overnight, officials and residents said Thursday.
About 2,000 villagers also fled their homes in Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
Mohammad Iftikhar boarded a vehicle with his family on Thursday as heavy rain lashed the region. “I am helplessly leaving my home for the safety of my children and wife,” he said.
India fires drones at Pakistan
India fired several Israeli-made Harop drones at Pakistan overnight and into Thursday afternoon, according to Pakistani army spokesman Lt. Gen. Ahmad Sharif, who said 29 were shot down. Two civilian were killed and another wounded when debris from a downed drone fell in Sindh province.
One drone damaged a military site near the city of Lahore and wounded four soldiers, and another fell in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, near the capital, according to Sharif. “The armed forces are neutralizing them as we speak,” he told state-run Pakistan Television.
In Lahore, local police official Mohammad Rizwan said a drone was downed near Walton Airport, an airfield in a residential area about 25 kilometers (16 miles) from the border with India that also contains military installations.
India’s Defense Ministry said its armed forces “targeted air defense radars and systems” in several places in Pakistan, including Lahore.
Blackout in Gurdaspur district
New Delhi, meanwhile, accused Pakistan of attempting “to engage a number of military targets” with missiles and drones along the Line of Control that divides Kashmir and elsewhere along their border. “The debris of these attacks in now being recovered from a number of locations,” it said.
At a news briefing, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar on Thursday rejected India’s claim that Islamabad carried out any attack in Indian Punjab. “These accusations are an attempt to incite anti-Pakistan sentiment among the Punjabi Sikh population in India,” he said.
Seated alongside Dar, the military spokesperson, Sharif said Pakistan shot down 29 Indian drones after they violated its airspace.
Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar told parliament that so far Pakistan has not responded to India’s missiles attacks, but there will be one. Later Thursday, Indian authorities ordered a night-time blackout in Punjab’s Gurdaspur district, which borders with Pakistan.
The Harop drone, produced by Israel’s IAI, is one of several in India’s inventory, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance report.
According to IAI, the Harop combines the capabilities of a drone and a missile and can operate at long ranges.
The two sides have also exchanged heavy fire over the past day.
Tarar said that the country’s armed forces have killed 40 to 50 Indian soldiers in the exchanges along the Line of Control. India has not commented on that claim. Earlier, the army said one Indian soldier was killed by shelling Wednesday.
Sikh Temple in Kashmir
Tarar denied Indian accusations that Pakistan had fired missiles toward the Indian city of Amritsar, saying in fact an Indian drone fell in the city. Neither claim could be confirmed.
India’s Foreign Ministry has said that 16 civilians were killed Wednesday during exchanges of fire across the de facto border.
Pakistani officials said six people have been killed near highly militarized frontier in exchanges of fire over the past day.
Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri denied that New Delhi has targeted civilians and a key dam, as Pakistan has alleged. He, in turn, accused Pakistani forces of targeting civilians, including at a Sikh Temple in Kashmir, where he said three Sikhs were killed.
Flights remained suspended at over two dozen airports across northern and western regions in India, according to travel adviseries by multiple airlines. Pakistan resumed flights nationwide after a suspension at four airports, according to the Civil Aviation Authority.
India and Pakistan trade fire and accusations as fears of wider military confrontation rise
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India and Pakistan trade fire and accusations as fears of wider military confrontation rise
- India acknowledged that it targeted Pakistan’s air defense system
- In Indian-controlled Kashmir, meanwhile, residents of the city of Jammu reported hearing explosions and sirens late Thursday
New strikes light up the night in Tehran as Israel vows ‘many surprises’
DUBAI: The Iran war exploded further late Saturday as pillars of flame rose above an oil storage facility in Tehran, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised “many surprises” for the next phase of the week-old conflict.
Israel’s military confirmed that it hit the fuel storage facilities in Tehran. Associated Press video showed the horizon glowing against the night sky above Tehran.
It appeared to be the first time a civil industrial facility has been targeted in the war. State media blamed “an attack from the US and the Zionist regime” at the facility that supplies the capital and neighboring provinces in the north.
Meanwhile, Israeli air strikes killed eight people in southern Lebanon, the Lebanese Health Ministry said, and local media reported that an Israeli drone hit a hotel in Beirut, killing four and wounding 10 others.
The Israeli military said early Sunday that it targeted commanders of the Lebanese branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force in Beirut. The deaths come on top of at least 47 others killed in Saturday’s Israeli strikes.
Strikes and drone attacks in Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia also caused havoc and some additional deaths.
Earlier in the day, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized for attacks on “neighboring countries,” even as his country’s missiles and drones flew toward Gulf Arab states and hard-liners asserted that Tehran’s war strategy would not change.
A rift between politicians looking to de-escalate the war and others committed to battling the United States and Israel could complicate any diplomatic efforts. Conflicting Iranian statements came from two of the three members of the leadership council overseeing Iran since Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the war’s opening airstrikes.
Pezeshkian, who is a member of the council, also dismissed US President Donald Trump’s call for Tehran to surrender unconditionally, saying: “That’s a dream that they should take to their grave.”
Trump threatened that Iran would be “hit very hard” and more “areas and groups of people” would become targets, without elaborating. Already, the conflict has rattled global markets and left Iran’s leadership weakened by hundreds of Israeli and American airstrikes.
“We’re not looking to settle,” Trump told reporters Saturday aboard Air Force One. “They’d like to settle. We’re not looking to settle.”
He described the ongoing US operations in Iran as an “excursion” and said issues such as rising gas prices and the safety of Americans would improve once the conflict ends.
Iran makes varying statements on attacks
Pezeshkian’s message, seemingly recorded in a hurry, underlined the limited powers exercised by the theocracy’s leaders over the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which controls the hundreds of ballistic missiles targeting Israel and other countries. It answered only to Khamenei and appears to be picking its own targets.
Pezeshkian’s statement said Iran’s leadership council had been in touch with the armed forces and “from now on, they should not attack neighboring countries or fire missiles at them, unless we are attacked by those countries. I think we should solve this through diplomacy.”
The US strikes have not come from the Gulf Arab governments under attack, but from US bases and vessels in the region.
But hard-line judiciary chief Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, another member of the three-man leadership council, suggested that war strategy will not change.
“The geography of some countries in the region — both overtly and covertly — is in the hands of the enemy, and those points are used against our country in acts of aggression. Intense attacks on these targets will continue,” he posted on X.
As long as US bases are present in the region, “the countries will not enjoy peace,” Iran’s Parliament speaker and a former Revolutionary Guard general, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said on X.
Iran’s UN mission later suggested, without offering evidence, that strikes on nonmilitary sites “may have resulted from interception by US electronic defense systems.”
Late Saturday, top Iranian security official Ali Larijani asserted in an address carried by state media that “our leaders are united on this issue and have no disagreements with one another.”
He also said the leadership council has requested that “arrangements be made” to convene the Assembly of Experts to choose the next supreme leader, but did not say when.
Trump says the Kurds won’t be involved
Trump said he has ruled out having Kurds join the war, even though Kurdish fighters in the region are willing to assist in efforts to topple the Iranian government.
“The war is complicated enough without having ... the Kurds involved,” Trump told reporters.
Days ago, Kurdish officials told the AP that Kurdish-Iranian dissident groups based in northern Iraq were preparing for a potential cross-border military operation in Iran and that the US had asked Iraqi Kurds to support them.
The US and Israel have targeted Iran’s military capabilities, leadership and nuclear program. The war’s stated goals and timelines have repeatedly shifted as the US has at times suggested it seeks to topple Iran’s government or elevate new leadership.
The fighting has killed at least 1,230 people in Iran, more than 290 in Lebanon and 11 in Israel, according to officials in those countries. Six US troops have been killed.
Incoming missiles from Iran had people heading to bomb shelters again across Israel, with no reports of casualties.
Missile lands at US Embassy compound in Iraq
Three Iraqi security officials said a missile landed on the helicopter landing pad in the US Embassy complex in Baghdad. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. An embassy spokesperson declined to comment. There were no reports of casualties.
It was the first reported strike to land in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone since the Iran war began. Iran and allied Iraqi militias have launched dozens of attacks on US military bases and other facilities in Iraq since then.
Iraq’s caretaker Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani called the embassy attack a “terrorist act” carried out by “rogue groups.”
Strikes target other Gulf countries
US allies in the Gulf have said the Trump administration did not give them adequate time to prepare for the war.
Hours after Pezeshkian’s apology, the United Arab Emirates said debris from an aerial interception fell onto a vehicle and killed a driver. Four people have now been killed in the UAE since the war began. Authorities have said all were foreign nationals.
Sirens sounded earlier Saturday in Bahrain as Iran targeted the island kingdom. Saudi Arabia said it destroyed drones headed toward its vast Shaybah oil field and shot down a ballistic missile launched toward Prince Sultan Air Base, which hosts US forces.
In Kuwait, authorities said a wave of drones targeted critical infrastructure, including fuel tanks at Kuwait International Airport and a government building in Kuwait City. At least two people were killed by strikes in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
