India says it targeted Pakistan’s air defenses in strikes on Thursday, in a sign of escalating violence between the two nuclear-armed countries.
India’s defense ministry said its forces had “targeted Air Defence Radars and systems at a number of locations in Pakistan.”
“It has been reliably learnt that an Air Defence system at Lahore has been neutralised,” the government said in a statement.
This was the first time India acknowledged going after Pakistani military installations.
Targeting air defenses threatens to deepen the crisis, as it removes defenses and clears the way for further and deeper strikes.
India’s statement doesn’t detail how the attacks were carried out.
Clashes between the two countries have ramped up in recent days, after India carried out military strikes overnight on Wednesday. It said these were in retaliation for a terrorist attack that killed 26 people in the contested region of Kashmir last month.
For its part, Pakistan claimed Thursday to have shot down 25 Indian drones, including Israeli-made HAROP long-range drones that can scout and strike targets.
The Jerusalem Post reported in 2019 that India had bought several batches of HAROP drones from Israel, including the purchase of 10 drones in a $100 million deal.
“Debris of Israeli-made Harop drones is being recovered from various areas across Pakistan,” the Pakistani military said in a statement.
India also said in the statement that it had neutralised Pakistani missile and drone attacks on its territory.
The use of drones in clashes between India and Pakistan is a worrying new development in a long-simmering conflict over Kashmir, and points to the growing influence of warfare techniques and technologies used in the war in Ukraine.
Both countries have used drones for years for reconnaissance in Kashmir, Christopher Clary, a professor at the University at Albany in New York, told BI, but never before “for apparent attacks on the other.”
“It seems possible both Pakistan and India were probing enemy air defenses,” he said of the strikes.
Pakistan said that 31 people have been killed in Indian strikes since Wednesday, while India says Pakistan’s attacks have killed 16.
The exchange of blows comes after an attack by Pakistani militants on Indian tourists in Kashmir on April 22, which killed 26 people. India has accused Pakistan of being behind the attack, an accusation Pakistan denies.
