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Pakistan’s military said it launched a wave of short-range missiles into India early on Saturday, as India targeted air bases deep inside Pakistan and the military conflict between the two nuclear-armed neighbours escalated closer to a full-scale war.
Pakistan said it had launched Operation “Bunyan-un-Marsoos” — named after a Koranic word roughly meaning a “wall of lead” — as a response to missile and drone attacks by India since May 7.
Pakistan’s military said it targeted a storage site for India’s supersonic BrahMos missile in Beas in the Indian state of Punjab, the Udhampur Air Field in the Indian subregion of Jammu and Kashmir and an airfield in Pathankot, also in Punjab.
In a late-night statement before Pakistan’s strikes, its military said India had launched six ballistic missiles towards three Pakistani air bases, including the Nur Khan air base near the garrison city of Rawalpindi, which houses the military’s general headquarters. It said only a few missiles made it past Pakistan’s air defences, and they did not hit “air assets”.
Late on Friday, the Indian military said Pakistan had targeted 26 locations from Baramulla in the disputed northern part of Kashmir to Bhuj in Gujarat, near the southern tip of the border between the two countries.
“These included suspected armed drones posing potential threats to civilian and military targets,” it said. An Indian district official in the border town of Rajouri in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir was killed in shelling from Pakistan, the region’s chief minister Omar Abdullah said.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has called a meeting of Pakistan’s National Command Authority, which is responsible for command and control of its nuclear arsenal, the military said on Saturday. The Pakistan Airports Authority said the country’s airspace would be closed until noon.
On Wednesday, India said it had carried out “precision strikes” on what it said were terrorist camps in Pakistan and the part of the disputed region of Kashmir that Pakistan administers. Both countries claim Kashmir.
The assault was India’s most extensive military attack on its neighbour since the Kargil War of 1999, and was in response to the mass shooting of 25 Indians and a Nepali citizen in Pahalgam, a tourist hub in Indian-administered Kashmir, on April 22. India blames the attack on militants backed by Pakistan, which Pakistan denies.
Pakistan accuses India of killing 33 civilians, including seven children, since aerial and drone attacks began on Wednesday, and officials have vowed to “avenge” the lost lives.
Inter-Services Public Relations, which speaks on behalf of Pakistan’s military, said it launched locally made Fatah missiles, a variation of which the country had brandished in a Monday test observed by the army chief Asim Munir. Posters attached to the land-based launchers said the missiles were “with love from” the seven children Islamabad claimed were killed by India on Wednesday, according to images shared by ISPR.
India has described its strikes on Pakistan as “measured, non-escalatory, proportionate, and responsible”.
