India launches strikes on Pakistan after Kashmir attack; dozens killed in border clashes
At least 36 people were reported killed. Pakistan said 26 civilians died in the Indian strikes and border firing. India said at least eight people were killed in shelling by Pakistan.
A view shows a damaged building after it was hit by an Indian strike in Muridke near Lahore, Pakistan, May 7, 2025.
INDIA and Pakistan exchanged heavy fire across their disputed border on Wednesday, after India carried out missile strikes targeting camps it said were linked to an earlier attack in Kashmir. The violence marked the worst confrontation between the two countries in two decades.
At least 36 people were reported killed. Pakistan said 26 civilians died in the Indian strikes and border firing. India said at least eight people were killed in shelling by Pakistan.
India's attack, which New Delhi called "Operation Sindoor", was named after the Hindi word for vermilion, a red powder that Hindu women put on the forehead or parting of their hair as a sign of marriage.
Indian air force officer Vyomika Singh said, "nine terrorist camps were targeted and successfully destroyed," days after New Delhi blamed Islamabad for supporting an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir.
The Indian army said, "justice is served", and the government said its actions "have been focused, measured and non-escalatory in nature".
Pakistan's defence minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif said Indian prime minister Narendra Modi had launched the strikes to "shore up" domestic popularity, but added, "The retaliation has already started. We won't take long to settle the score," he told AFP.
India's Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, along with Colonel Sophia Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh, holds a press briefing following India's military strikes on Pakistan, in New Delhi, India, May 7, 2025. (Photo: Reuters)
At a press conference in Islamabad, military spokesperson Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said Pakistan had downed five Indian jets, including three French Rafale fighter aircraft. He said the jets had attacked targets in Pakistan.
Chaudhry also said a hydropower plant in Pakistan-administered Kashmir had been targeted, damaging a dam structure.
An unnamed Indian security source said three Indian jets crashed inside Indian territory. The wreckage of one aircraft was seen by an AFP photographer in Wuyan, on the Indian side of Kashmir.
Pakistan’s military said 21 civilians were killed in the strikes and five others in gunfire at the border. Four children, including two girls aged three, were among the dead.
In Muzaffarabad, the main city in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, troops cordoned off an area near a mosque that Islamabad said was hit. Explosion marks were also visible on nearby homes.
India's army later accused Pakistan of "indiscriminate" firing across the Line of Control. AFP reporters saw shells landing and flames erupting in the area.
"We woke up as we heard the sound of firing," said Farooq, a man from the Indian town of Poonch, speaking to Press Trust of India from his hospital bed. "I saw shelling raining down... two persons were wounded."
Azhar Majid, a local revenue officer in Poonch, said at least eight people were killed and 29 injured in the town.
India’s military response followed the April 22 attack on tourists in Pahalgam, Indian-administered Kashmir, which left 26 people dead, mostly Hindu men. New Delhi blamed the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is designated a terrorist organisation by the UN.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. Pakistan denied involvement and called for an independent investigation.
Since April 24, India and Pakistan have exchanged nightly fire along the Line of Control, according to India’s army. Pakistan said it had also conducted two missile tests.
'Maximum restraint'
India and Pakistan have fought several wars since 1947, when they were formed after British rule ended.
The latest strikes are on a larger scale than India's 2019 operation, when it said it targeted camps following a suicide bombing that killed 40 Indian security personnel.
"India's strike on Pakistan is of much greater scale than the one in 2019... Pakistan's response... has also exceeded the scale of 2019," said US-based analyst Michael Kugelman.
UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said in a statement, "The world cannot afford a military confrontation between India and Pakistan."
US President Donald Trump said he hoped the fighting "ends very quickly". US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had spoken to top officials in both countries and was monitoring the situation "closely".
India’s army said it had shown "considerable restraint in selection of targets and method of execution" and stated, "no Pakistani military facilities have been targeted".
Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called the Indian strikes "unprovoked" and "cowardly" and said the "heinous act of aggression will not go unpunished."
An insurgency has been ongoing in Indian-administered Kashmir since 1989. India accuses Pakistan of supporting armed groups in the region, a charge Islamabad denies.
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi is expected in New Delhi on Wednesday after visiting Islamabad two days earlier, as Iran seeks to mediate.
India planned to conduct civil defence drills on Wednesday. Schools were shut in Pakistan’s Punjab and Kashmir regions, officials said.
The strikes came hours after Modi said water flowing across India's borders would be stopped. Pakistan had said any move to tamper with cross-border rivers would be an "act of war".
US president Donald Trump and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi meet in the Oval Office at the White House on February 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
INDIA's prime minister Narendra Modi told US president Donald Trump late on Tuesday (17) that a ceasefire between India and Pakistan after a four-day conflict in May was achieved through talks between the two militaries and not US mediation, India's senior-most diplomat said.
Trump had said last month that the south Asian neighbours agreed to a ceasefire after talks mediated by the US, and that the hostilities ended after he urged the countries to focus on trade instead of war.
India has previously denied any third-party mediation and Tuesday's phone call between Modi and Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada, which Modi attended as a guest, is their first direct exchange since the May 7-10 conflict.
"PM Modi told president Trump clearly that during this period, there was no talk at any stage on subjects like India-US trade deal or US mediation between India and Pakistan," Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri said in a press statement.
"Talks for ceasing military action happened directly between India and Pakistan through existing military channels, and on the insistence of Pakistan. Prime minister Modi emphasised that India has not accepted mediation in the past and will never do," he said.
Misri said the two leaders were due to meet on the sidelines of G7 summit but Trump left a day early due to the situation in the Middle East.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Modi-Trump call.
The heaviest fighting in decades between India and Pakistan was sparked by an April 22 attack in Indian Kashmir that killed 26 people, most of them tourists. New Delhi blamed the incident on "terrorists" backed by Pakistan, a charge denied by Islamabad.
On May 7, Indian jets bombed what New Delhi called "terrorist infrastructure" sites across the border, triggering tit-for-tat strikes spread over four days in which both sides used fighter jets, missiles, drones and artillery.
Misri said that Trump expressed his support for India's fight against terrorism and that Modi told him India's Operation Sindoor under which it launched the cross border strikes was still on.
Trump also asked Modi if he could stop by the US on his return from Canada, Misri said, but the Indian leader expressed his inability to do so due to a pre-decided schedule. He invited Trump to visit India later this year for the summit of the leaders of the Quad grouping, which Trump accepted, Misri said.
By clicking the 'Subscribe’, you agree to receive our newsletter, marketing communications and industry
partners/sponsors sharing promotional product information via email and print communication from Garavi Gujarat
Publications Ltd and subsidiaries. You have the right to withdraw your consent at any time by clicking the
unsubscribe link in our emails. We will use your email address to personalize our communications and send you
relevant offers. Your data will be stored up to 30 days after unsubscribing.
Contact us at data@amg.biz to see how we manage and store your data.
The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) stood at 2.6 per cent in March, down from 2.8 per cent in February, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. (Representational image: iStock)
UK INFLATION eased slightly in May but remained above expectations, according to official figures released on Wednesday, adding to speculation that the Bank of England will keep interest rates unchanged this week.
The Consumer Prices Index fell to 3.4 per cent in May from 3.5 per cent in April, which had marked a 15-month high, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.
Analysts had expected a bigger drop to 3.3 per cent.
The release came after separate data last week showed that the UK economy contracted more than expected in April.
Gross domestic product fell by 0.3 per cent, driven by a tax increase on UK businesses and a sharp decline in exports to the United States linked to president Donald Trump's tariffs.
Political responses
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said, "Our number one mission is to put more money in the pockets of working people."
Mel Stride, the finance spokesperson for the opposition Conservatives, said inflation staying "well above" the Bank of England's 2 per cent target "is deeply worrying for families".
The Bank of England is expected to leave its key interest rate unchanged at 4.25 per cent when it announces its decision on Thursday.
Mixed price movements
"A variety of counteracting price movements meant inflation was little changed in May," said Richard Heys, acting chief economist at the ONS.
"Air fares fell this month, compared with a large rise at the same time last year," he said. However, higher prices for chocolate and meat helped to offset the fall in motor fuel costs.
Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at AJ Bell, said, "The escalating conflict between Israel and Iran has impacted the oil price in the past week, with UK motorists already bracing themselves for hikes and airfares also expected to soar."
Interest rate outlook
The Bank of England cut interest rates last month by a quarter point, its fourth reduction in nine months, as tariffs continued to weigh on economic growth.
Analysts expect the central bank to maintain that pace of easing until at least early next year.
Sarah Coles, head of personal finance at Hargreaves Lansdown, said, "The fact that inflation has fallen back slightly... should bring some comfort to the Bank of England as it considers the next move for interest rates."
"They were expecting inflation to remain well above target at this point in the year, so it won't necessarily spark a rethink on rates.
"Before the announcement, the markets were expecting two more cuts by the end of the year, and there's a reasonable chance this won't move significantly on the back of today's news," she added.
(With inputs from agencies)
Keep ReadingShow less
Protesters from pro-choice group 'abortion rights' gather near parliament, where MPs were voting on the decriminalisation of abortion on June 17, 2025 in London. (Photo: Getty Images)
UK MPs have voted in favour of ending the prosecution of women in England and Wales for ending their own pregnancies, marking a significant step towards changing how abortion laws are applied.
Under current laws, women can face criminal charges if they terminate a pregnancy after 24 weeks or without the approval of two doctors. These laws still carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The vote follows public attention on the issue after recent court cases, including one where a woman was acquitted at trial and another who was released from prison on appeal.
On Tuesday, MPs backed an amendment by Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi by a majority of 242. The amendment would ensure that women cannot be criminally prosecuted for ending their own pregnancies at any stage. However, it does not alter the existing abortion laws themselves.
The wider crime and policing bill must now go through a full parliamentary vote and then be passed by the House of Lords to become law.
Existing laws under scrutiny
“Women are currently being arrested from hospital bed to police cell and facing criminal investigations on suspicion of ending their own pregnancy,” Antoniazzi told AFP.
“My amendment would put a stop to this,” she said, calling it “the right amendment at the right time”.
In England and Wales, abortion remains a criminal offence under the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, which still carries the potential for life imprisonment.
The Abortion Act of 1967 legalised terminations in certain circumstances, including up to 23 weeks and six days of pregnancy, when performed by authorised providers.
Abortions beyond that time are permitted only in limited situations, such as when the mother’s life is at risk or if there is a “substantial risk” the child may be born with a serious disability.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the law was updated to allow women to take abortion pills at home up to 10 weeks into pregnancy.
Recent court cases
In May, Nicola Packer was acquitted after taking prescribed abortion medicine when she was about 26 weeks pregnant, beyond the legal limit for home use.
The 45-year-old told jurors during her trial — which followed a four-year police investigation — that she had not realised how far along her pregnancy was.
“It was horrendous giving evidence, absolutely awful,” she told The Guardian last month.
Concerns and support
The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children has described the proposed amendment as “the greatest threat to unborn babies in decades”.
Antoniazzi’s amendment does not change laws concerning how abortion services are provided or the time limits involved. Medical professionals who assist in abortions outside of legal provisions will still face prosecution.
Around 50 organisations, including abortion providers, medical bodies and women’s rights groups, support the amendment.
They note that six women in England have been taken to court in the past three years for ending or attempting to end their pregnancies outside legal frameworks.
Carla Foster was jailed in 2023 after taking abortion pills to end her pregnancy between 32 and 34 weeks. Her sentence was later suspended by the Court of Appeal.
Antoniazzi told the BBC that police had investigated “more than 100 women for suspected illegal abortion in the last five years including women who’ve suffered natural miscarriages and stillbirths”.
“This is just wrong. It's a waste of taxpayers money, it's a waste of the judiciary’s time, and it's not in the public interest,” she said.
Responding to the vote, prime minister Keir Starmer said on Tuesday that women have the right to a “safe and legal abortion”.
Northern Ireland decriminalised abortion for women in 2019. Scotland is currently reviewing its abortion laws.
(With inputs from agencies)
Keep ReadingShow less
A woman poses with a sign as members of the public queue to enter a council meeting during a protest calling for justice for victims of sexual abuse and grooming gangs, outside the council offices at City Centre on January 20, 2025 in Oldham, England
WAS a national inquiry needed into so-called grooming gangs? Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer did not think so in January, but now accepts Dame Louise Casey’s recommendation to commission one.
The previous Conservative government – having held a seven-year national inquiry into child sexual abuse – started loudly championing a new national inquiry once it lost the power to call one. Casey explains why she changed her mind too after her four-month, rapid audit into actions taken and missed on group-based exploitation and abuse. A headline Casey theme is the ‘shying away’ from race.
The (Alexis) Jay inquiry (in 2014) found ethnicity data too patchy to draw firm conclusions. Casey shows that too little has changed. Ethnicity data on perpetrators is published – but the police fail to collect it in a third of cases. That low priority to ethnicity data collection is a problem across policing – forming an impediment to scrutiny of ethnic disparities of every kind.
In Greater Manchester, Casey reports perpetrators of sexual abuse generally reflect the local population, but with a disproportionate number of Asian perpetrators in group-based offending. There was a misplaced ‘political correctness’ when police forces and councils were responding to group-based abuse by British Pakistani perpetrators. Yet, there was nothing ‘politically correct’ about a sexist, classist culture that did not believe the victims. They were often vulnerable, adolescent girls with a history of living in care or with repeated episodes of going missing – and were seen as wayward teenagers, treated as ‘consenting’ to sex once they had turned thirteen.
Our society was much too slow to act on the abuse of children in every setting. The trigger for the national inquiry into child sexual exploitation was the outpouring of allegations about Jimmy Saville. In every setting, the instinct was more often to cover up rather than to clean up. Care homes failed to protect the most vulnerable. Prestigious public schools put containing reputational damage first. The focus on institutions meant that group-based offending formed only one strand of the national inquiry, without the scale to dig fully into local experiences.
There is a key difference between group-based and individual offending. Groups are a joint enterprise, so depend on a shared rejection of social norms among the perpetrators. It is important to be able to talk confidently about toxic sub-cultures of misogyny and abuse within British Pakistani communities, and to support women from within Asian communities and feminist allies who have been seeking to challenge and change it. So why has it seemed so difficult to say this – and to have taken too long to act upon it?
When writing my book How to be a patriot a couple of years ago, I suggested that one key driver of this misplaced reluctance to discuss cultural factors over this issue reflects a confusion and conflation between ethnicity, faith and culture. If people intuit that talking about cultural factors must mean something like ‘the inherent properties of an ethnic and faith group’, there is a fear that this will inevitability generalise about and stereotype whole groups. Yet, few people would struggle to acknowledge the role of cultural factors in the role of the
Church in twentieth century Ireland. A social norm that saw sex and sexuality as a taboo subject, combined with institutional deference to the church, left children unprotected – until there was significant pressure for change. So ‘cultural factors’ were part of the problem – but that did not mean that all Catholics were child-molesters. The trial in France of 51 men involved in raping one woman similarly illustrates the culture of misogyny in France among a sub-group of men willing to join in a rape gang when invited to do so.
So the irony is that it would perpetuate precisely that kind of ethnic stereotype to fail to police the law so as not to offend the Pakistani Muslim community, by seeming to turn the behaviour of a criminal sub-group into a community characteristic. Failing to address sexual exploitation for fear of extremist exploitation of the issue was always self-defeating. Being able to address the issue is a key foundation for being able to challenge effectively those whose motive is to spread prejudice.
The reviews by Jay and Casey into group-based exploitation in Rotherham had profile and consequences in 2015. The entire council leadership resigned. In most other places, victims went and felt unheard. There was a sound logic that local inquiries were most likely to have the granular focus to deliver accountability – but few areas volunteered to host them. Those that did happen lacked the teeth to compel cooperation.
Casey’s proposed model is essentially for local hearings, backed by statutory national powers. It is a chance to move on from partisan blame games and ensure that the victims of historic abuse are finally heard – rebuilding confidence in policing and prosecuting without fear or favour.
Sunder Katwala is the director of thinktank British Future and the author of the book How to Be a Patriot: The must-read book on British national identity and immigration.
Keep ReadingShow less
Yvette Cooper told parliament that any adult who engages in penetrative sex with a child under 16 will now face the most serious charge of rape. (Photo: Getty Images)
THE UK government on Monday introduced new laws to tackle grooming gangs and apologised to the thousands of victims believed to have been sexually exploited across the country.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper told parliament that any adult who engages in penetrative sex with a child under 16 will now face the most serious charge of rape. The move is part of a nationwide crackdown on grooming gangs.
The announcement coincided with the release of a report by parliamentarian Louise Casey, which examined the decades-long grooming scandal that has affected multiple towns and cities across Britain.
The report highlighted institutional failures, noting that young girls and women were often blamed for their own abuse.
On Friday, seven men were convicted in the latest grooming trial in the UK. Jurors heard that two victims were made to have sex “with multiple men on the same day, in filthy flats and on rancid mattresses”.
One victim said social workers had considered her “a prostitute” from the age of 10.
In a separate case, three other men appeared at Sheffield Crown Court on Monday. They denied charges of raping a teenage girl in Rotherham between 2008 and 2010.
Although the age of consent in the UK is 16, Casey’s report said too many grooming cases involving 13 to 15-year-olds had been dropped or downgraded when the children were wrongly viewed as having been “in love with” or having “consented to” sex with adults.
The report pointed to a “grey area” in the law for 13 to 15-year-olds, where charging decisions were “left more open to interpretation”. While this was meant to avoid criminalising teenage relationships, it had in practice helped “much older men who had groomed underage children for sex”.
National inquiry launched
Prime minister Keir Starmer said on Sunday that a national inquiry would be launched, one of the 12 recommendations made by Casey.
The inquiry will be led by a national commission with statutory powers to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath and will oversee all local investigations.
“It will go wherever it needs to go,” Starmer said on Monday.
Victims have long demanded a national inquiry. Jayne Senior, an early whistleblower, told AFP on Monday that the outcome “will depend on who leads it” and what powers they are given.
Senior, who is mentioned in the Casey report, said the government had still not protected whistleblowers. She also asked what action would be taken against police officers who had obstructed her efforts to bring perpetrators to justice in Rotherham.
The Casey report said ethnicity was often ignored, with two-thirds of perpetrators’ ethnicity not recorded, making national assessments unreliable.
“We found many examples of organisations avoiding the topic altogether for fear of appearing racist, raising community tensions or causing community cohesion problems,” the report stated.
However, local data from West Yorkshire collected between 2020 and 2024 showed that 429 out of 1222 suspects, or 35 per cent, self-defined as Asian.
Cooper said Asian men, particularly those of Pakistani background, were “overrepresented”. She added that ethnicity and nationality will now be recorded mandatorily.
Casey noted that “it does no community any good to ignore” evidence of disproportionality “in any form of offending, be that amongst perpetrators or victims”.
Long-term abuse
The issue received global attention in January after tech billionaire Elon Musk criticised the UK government on his X platform for not agreeing to a national inquiry.
Casey wrote that gangs targeted vulnerable adolescents, including those in care or with learning or physical disabilities. In many cases, a man would present himself as a boyfriend and offer gifts and affection.
“Subsequently, they pass them to other men for sex, using drugs and alcohol to make children compliant, often turning to violence and coercion to control them,” she wrote.
According to the report, this pattern of abuse has changed little over time. Grooming often now begins online, with locations shifting from parks to vape shops and hotels that allow anonymous check-ins.
Gangs have operated in towns and cities across England, including Rotherham and Rochdale in the north, and Oxford and Bristol in the south, for nearly four decades.
“On behalf of this, and past governments, and the many public authorities who let you down, I want to reiterate an unequivocal apology for the unimaginable pain and suffering that you have suffered, and the failure of our country's institutions through decades, to prevent that harm and keep you safe,” Cooper told parliament.