Pakistan authorises ‘corresponding’ retaliation after India missile strikes kill 26
Pakistan authorises ‘corresponding’ retaliation after India missile strikes kill 26
Fears raised of escalating conflict after statement accusing India of ‘igniting an inferno’ in Kashmir and Punjab
Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi and Aakash Hassan in KashmirWed 7 May 2025 12.08 EDTShare
Pakistan has authorised its military to take “corresponding” retaliatory action against India after overnight missile attacks by the Indian air force killed 26 people, raising fears of an escalating conflict between the two nuclear-armed countries.
In a strongly worded statement, Pakistan accused India of “igniting an inferno” in the region after it carried out targeted strikes on nine sites in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and the Pakistani province of Punjab in the early hours of Wednesday.
India said the strikes were a direct retaliation for an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir late last month, in which militants killed 25 Hindu tourists and their guide.
India had accused Pakistan of direct involvement in the attacks, through Islamist militant organisations it has long been accused of backing. After India’s airstrikes on Wednesday, which killed 26 people including several children and injured 45, it jubilantly claimed victory over Pakistan.https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2025/05/kashmir-airstrikesmap/giv-325546Orw1fO45DB5/?dark=false
The Indian army said the strikes had targeted terrorists and terrorist training 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, while the home affairs minister, Amit Shah, said the government was “resolved to give a befitting response to any attack on India and its people”.
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.
For the first time since the India-Pakistan war in 1971, Indian missiles struck inside Punjab, Pakistan’s most politically and militarily important province, killing at least 16 people there.
Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, said his country saw India’s strikes as a “blatant act of war” and intended to take retaliatory action, though he did not say what form that would take. At a meeting of the national security council on Wednesday, Sharif’s government gave the country’s military authorisation to take action to defend Pakistan’s sovereignty “at a time, place, and manner of its choosing”.
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At a session of parliament on Wednesday, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, co-chair of the Pakistan People’s party, which rules as part of the coalition government, reaffirmed the country’s right to defend itself and said that Pakistan’s answer to India’s attacks “has yet to come”.
“Pakistan has the right to respond to this attack however it wants,” he said.
Kashmir, in the foothills of the Himalayas, has been disputed since the partition of India and the formation of Pakistan in 1947. Both India and Pakistan claim it in full, but each administers a section of the territory, separated by one of the world’s most heavily militarised borders: the “line of control” based on a ceasefire border established after the 1947-48 war. China administers another part in the east.
