Pakistan accuses India of having fired missiles at the gates of Islamabad

Pakistan accused India on Saturday of having shot missiles on air bases, including one near Islamabad, while the worst confrontation between the two nuclear powers for decades has already killed around fifty civilians from the two camps.

Shortly before dawn, when two explosions had just sounded in Islamabad and his twin city Rawalpindi, seat of the army and intelligence, the spokesman for the Pakistani army appeared on state television.

“India has attacked the bases of Nour Khan, Mourid and Chorkot with missiles (…),” he said. “Now are waiting for our response,” he concluded in English.

Drone attacks

If Islamabad claims to have not yet carried out the “response” which he has been promising for Indian strikes on Wednesday, for the second consecutive evening, New Delhi said it was the target of a wave of Pakistani drone attacks in Kashmir and Penjab, in the northwest of its territory.

The chief of the cashmere executive, Omar Abdullah, reported “intermittent detonations” in Jammu. “More electricity now. We hear sirens in the city, “he wrote on X.

On Wednesday, India led strikes on Pakistani soil, in retaliation for an attack committed on April 22 in the Indian cashmere. The attack that killed 26 civilians was not claimed but India accuses Pakistan despite its denials.

Since then, missile strikes, artillery fire and drone attacks follow one another while the two neighbors, rivals since their painful partition in 1947, ignore calls for de -escalation from abroad.

Closed airports

India has closed 24 airports and local media claim that air traffic will be suspended until next week.

Already Thursday evening, India had reported “multiple attacks” on its territory and artillery fire which continued all night along the “control line”, the de facto border that shares the cashmere.

In front of the press, an army spokesperson Vyomika Singh described “incursions (…) with around 300 to 400 drones”, according to her all pushed. The officer also mentioned “losses and wounded” in both camps, without further details.

The Pakistani army said it had shot 77 Indian drones since the start of hostilities. The assertions of the two camps are impossible to verify an independent source, in particular because many areas are inaccessible.

No sign of appeasement

The two capitals did not give any signs of appeasement on Friday and continued to refine the responsibility for the fighting and the civil losses they cause.

The International Crisis Group International Reflection Center (ICG) worried about “bellicose rhetoric, domestic agitation and the boutish logic of the overbidding” of the two neighbors.

If on both sides of the border, leaders and high-grades multiply the threats, the inhabitants, buried their dead and try to resume the course of their lives under the threat of bombing.

“This morning I came to the market to find a little work but everything is closed,” deplores AFP Mohammed Lateef Bhat, a resident of Uri, in Indian cashmere. “I’m going to get empty -handed.”

Private school children

“Our lives are worth nothing, at any time, whole families can disappear,” worries Nassir Ahmed Khan, 50, from his village close to the control line. “Our children cannot sleep and we cannot share a meal quietly.”

Tens of millions of children are deprived of school on both sides of the border.

Friday, the head of Saudi diplomacy, Adel al-Jubeir landed on the basis of Nour Khan.

After his Iranian rival who went to Islamabad and then Delhi in recent days, Ryad tries to push the two neighbors to “de -escalation” and seeks to “work to resolve all the subjects of argument through dialogue and diplomatic ways”, according to a press release from Saudi diplomacy published by the Saudi official press agency (SPA).

The confrontation between the two countries is also raging on the information front.

India has ordered more than 8,000 accounts on Thursday, including those of international media. The social network has said to have conformed to it reluctantly, denouncing a “censorship”. New Delhi had already demanded the ban in India from several accounts of political, celebrities or Pakistani media.

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