Pakistan Says 8 Civilians Killed In Military Operation Launched By India

By Daud Khattak May 06, 2025

Pakistan said eight people were killed early on May 7 in missile strikes launched by Indian armed forces, and the country's prime minister vowed to respond, saying Pakistan has every right to give robust response to what he called an act of war.

The director-general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Lieutenant General Ahmad Sharif, told a news conference there had been "24 impacts from India on six places" and these resulted in the killing of eights citizen and the wounding of 35. Another eight are missing.

"Pakistan will return a response to the attack," he said before ending the news conference without taking questions.

He did not mention a report that the country's air force shot down Indian jets in retaliation. Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said on X that three Indian jets and one Indian drone had been shot down by Pakistan.

Speaking earlier to Urdu language TV channels, Pakistani Defense Minister Khwaja Asif said only civilian targets were hit in the missile attack.

Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif scheduled an emergency meeting of the National Security Committee for 10 a.m. (local time) on May 7.

The chief minister of Punjab Province, Maryam Nawaz, declared a state of emergency in the province, which borders India. All schools, colleges, and universities will be closed. Police and other security agencies have been placed on high alert, and doctors on leave have been asked to report for duty.

Pakistan has suspended all flights and operations at the Lahore and Islamabad airports for the next 48 hours, and the Lahore airport has been vacated.

An Indian military statement referred to the action as Operation Sindoor and said nine sites were hit.

"A little while ago, the Indian Armed Forces launched 'OPERATION SINDOOR', hitting terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir from where terrorist attacks against India have been planned and directed," the statement said.

"Our actions have been focused, measured and non-escalatory in nature. No Pakistan military facilities have been targeted," the statement said, adding that "India has demonstrated considerable restraint in selection of targets and method of execution."

Multiple loud explosions were heard in the mountains around the city of Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani Kashmir, as well as in other places in the region, according to Reuters and a Pakistani TV channel. One missile fired at the Muridke area near Lahore.

After the explosions, Muzaffarabad lost electrical power causing a blackout throughout the city, Reuters reported quoting witnesses.

The ISPR said India fired missiles at two other locations in addition to Muzaffarabad -- Kotli in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and Bahawalpur in Punjab Province. The Bahawalpur and Muridke areas are considered centers for the banned groups Jaish-e Muhammad and Lashkar-e Jhangvi.

The attack represents a major escalation between the two nuclear-armed neighbors and sounded alarm bells in Washington, where US President Donald Trump said he had been informed about the attack and hopes the fighting "ends very quickly" and in New York, where UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed concern about the attack and called for maximum restraint from both countries.

"The world cannot afford a military confrontation between India and Pakistan," Guterres said, according to his spokesman.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio contacted Pakistani National Security Adviser Lieutenant General Asim Malik, who is also chief of Pakistan's prime intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to discussed the situation.

The development comes amid heightened tensions between the two countries in the aftermath of an attack on Hindu tourists in Indian Kashmir last month.

India blamed Pakistan for the violence in which 26 men were killed and vowed to respond. Pakistan denied that it had anything to do with the killings and said that it had intelligence that India was planning to attack.

Hassan Abbas, distinguished professor of international relations at Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, told RFE/RL that while terrorism must always be condemned, Pakistan's hasty framing of the incident as a false-flag operation by India -- without investigation -- is irresponsible. Equally, India's rush to blame Pakistan without credible evidence only deepens mistrust and raises the risk of escalation, Abbas said.

"We need a different kind of courage now -- the courage to imagine cooperation...not confrontation. In a region facing the twin crises of poverty and climate vulnerability, war is a luxury no one can afford," Abbas said.

Hussain Haqqani, former Pakistani ambassador to the United States and senior fellow at the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy and Hudson Foundation, told RFE/RL that domestic politics on both sides requires the leadership of the two countries to take nationalistic stance.

The only sane approach in this situation for India is to demonstrate a strike and for Pakistan to respond in a way that the situation should not flare up, Haqqani said.

"But if one side strikes, then another responds, and then the other strike again and it continues, then it could go out of control," he added.

Although the people of the two countries are cheering at the moment, it would be the people who would be hurt the most, because economies of the two countries will suffer, he said.

Tauseef Ahmad Khan, an author and former head of the Mass Communication Department at Federal Urdu University in Karachi, said that India-Pakistan tensions ignite artificial patriotism.

"The 1.5 billion people of the region -- many living in poverty -- are the real victims of this conflict," Khan said.

Khan also claimed that Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party aims to reshape secular India into a Hindu state, while Pakistani media has long been used by the "deep state" to propagate anti-democratic narratives.

Indian media is under the influence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "Hindutva" ideology, while Pakistani media is tightly controlled by what he called the deep state, Khan told RFE/RL.

"There's no room left for sanity," he said.

With reporting by Reuters and AP

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/33406535.html

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