Live Updates: India and Pakistan Announce Cease-Fire
India and Pakistan said on Saturday that they had agreed to a cease-fire after four days of drone volleys and missile strikes, the most intense fighting between the rivals in decades. But there were reports at night of continued shelling along the border.
President Trump announced the cease-fire on his social media site and said it had been mediated by the United States. Indian and Pakistani officials confirmed the cease-fire, though only Pakistan acknowledged an American role.
“We thank President Trump for his leadership and proactive role for peace in the region,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan said on social media. “Pakistan appreciates the United States for facilitating this outcome, which we have accepted in the interest of regional peace and stability.”
As night set in, though, there were indications that the cease-fire was not entirely holding. Cross-border firing was reported in some areas of the Indian part of Kashmir, the disputed territory at the heart of India and Pakistan’s conflict. Surinder Kumar Choudhary, the second-highest elected official in the Indian-administered area of Kashmir, said there had been cross-border firing.
A senior Indian official confirmed that there had also been firing along the boundary between India and Pakistan. And he said that Pakistani drones had appeared over Srinagar, the capital city of the Indian-administered part of Kashmir, as well as over the Indian state of Punjab. The official said these developments were violations of the agreement that called for a cessation of all military activity.
The current crisis began last month with a deadly attack by militants in India-controlled Kashmir. India accused Pakistan of being involved in the attack; Pakistan denied that claim.
High tensions spiraled into a military confrontation on Wednesday when India launched airstrikes on Pakistan. In the days that followed, there were intense rounds of fighting involving waves of attack drones and missiles. By Saturday morning, each country was striking the other’s air bases.
Here’s what else to know:
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U.S. involvement: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement on Saturday that he and Vice President JD Vance had engaged with senior officials from both countries, including their prime ministers, over 48 hours. In addition to the cease-fire, India and Pakistan also agreed to “start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site,” Mr. Rubio said.
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Other diplomatic efforts: Several countries with close ties to both India and Pakistan, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, had been working for days to try to cool the conflict. The United States, the European Union and China had all urged maximum restraint from Pakistan and India as fears grew of a full-blown war.
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Global relief: Leaders around the world expressed relief after the announcement of a cease-fire. David Lammy, Britain’s foreign minister, said on social media that the cease-fire was “hugely welcome.” He added: “I urge both parties to sustain this. De-escalation is in everybody’s interest.” The German Foreign Office said on social media that the agreement to halt fighting was a “first, important step out of the escalation spiral.”
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Drone war: This was the first time India and Pakistan used attack drones on a large scale against each other. Both India and Pakistan have been developing their own drones, and they also import them. Most of the drones they deployed this week appeared to be one-way Kamikaze drones, which have become ubiquitous in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
A senior Pakistani intelligence official praised Secretary of State Marco Rubio for his role in negotiating the cease-fire with India, but credited President Trump’s direct intervention with closing the agreement. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence, said Pakistan hoped that Trump’s involvement would allow the agreement to hold.
As they try to shape the narrative after four days of military conflict, Pakistani officials argued that they had gotten the upper hand. The senior Pakistani intelligence official said that Pakistan had lost no aircraft, while India had lost five. (The Indian government has not officially acknowledged having lost any aircraft, though evidence suggests it lost at least two.) The Pakistani official also claimed that Pakistan had taken out Indian air defense systems, including a Russian-designed S-400 system. India denied that Pakistan took out the S-400.
A senior Indian official confirmed that there had been firing along the boundary between India and Pakistan. He also said that Pakistani drones had appeared over Srinagar, the capital city of Indian-administered Kashmir, as well as over the Indian state of Punjab. The official said these developments were violations of the agreement calling for a cessation of all military activity.
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Mohan Lal, a local lawmaker in the Akhnoor area of Jammu and Kashmir, said cross-border firing, including artillery, had been going on for the past two hours. “No fresh casualties are reported, but shelling is taking place,” he said.
As night set in, there were indications that the cease-fire was not holding entirely. Cross-border firing was reported in some areas of Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian part of the disputed region. Surinder Kumar Choudhary, the region’s second-highest elected official, said there had been cross-border firing in the Rajouri district for the past 25 minutes.
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Residents in the city of Barnala, on the side of Kashmir controlled by Pakistan, reported hearing exchanges of fire along the line dividing the region.
The top elected official on the Indian side of Kashmir reported more violence as breaches of the cease-fire became clear. “What the hell just happened to the cease-fire? Explosions heard across Srinagar!!!” the official, Omar Abdullah, wrote on social media, referring to his region’s capital city.
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In the first public acknowledgement from either side of the U.S. role in the cease-fire, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan thanked President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Pakistan appreciates the United States for facilitating this outcome, which we have accepted in the interest of regional peace and stability,” Sharif said.
David Lammy, Britain’s foreign minister, said the cease-fire was “hugely welcome.” He added: “I urge both parties to sustain this. De-escalation is in everybody’s interest.” Lammy had said earlier that he called his Indian and Pakistani counterparts to urge dialogue after the fighting escalated on Saturday.
The German government also welcomed the cease-fire and said it had been in contact with both India and Pakistan in recent days. The agreement to halt fighting is a “first, important step out of the escalation spiral,” the German Foreign Office said on social media.
The coming days will remain tenuous. In the build-up to the announcement of the cease-fire, India’s public broadcaster quoted officials as saying that “any future act of terror will be considered an act of war.” That keeps the stakes high for any violations of the truce, particularly in the border region in Kashmir, where militants have been active. Among them may be the perpetrators of last month’s terrorist attack, given that India has not announced that they have been arrested or killed.
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The spark for the latest conflict between India and Pakistan, the most expansive fighting between the two countries in decades, was a terrorist attack on civilians in Kashmir last month.
The Indian government had been projecting calm on its side of the disputed Kashmir region. A group of militants managed to puncture that image. They came out of the woods in a scenic picnic spot and killed 26 men. The men, almost all of them Hindu, were singled out for their religion, and many of them were killed in front of their wives and families, according to witness accounts.
A little-known group called the Resistance Front claimed responsibility. The Indian government said that the group was a front for a broader terrorist apparatus that has operated out of Pakistan. Pakistan has rejected those claims.
Here is what we know about the groups that India said it had targeted in its military strikes.
What are the two main groups India targeted?
Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was founded in the 1980s, has long been suspected of planning from Pakistan some of the worst terrorist attacks in India. It was added to a United Nations sanctions list in 2005.
One of the deadliest attacks the group orchestrated was a 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, during which more than 160 people were killed. Nearly a dozen gunmen arrived on boats and held hostages at a major hotel for days. One of the attackers was captured alive, and much of the account of the attack’s ties to Pakistan came from his confessions. He was sentenced in India in 2010 and executed in 2012.
Pakistan has confirmed Lashkar-e-Taiba’s links to past violence in India but says that the group was outlawed and disbanded long ago. The group’s founder, Hafiz Saeed, is free despite brief periods of detention, and Indian officials say that the group continues its activities through cover organizations and offshoots, such as the Resistance Front.
Jaish-e-Mohammed, the second group that Indian officials said they had targeted in their attacks, has long had a major hand in the militancy in Kashmir. But its activities have not been limited to the region.
The group’s founder, Masood Azhar, was imprisoned in India in the 1990s for militant activity in Kashmir but was released as part of a hostage deal in 1999. Hijackers took an Indian Airlines flight to Kandahar, Afghanistan, and demanded the release of Mr. Azhar and other militants in return for freeing the more than 150 passengers they were holding.
Jaish-e-Mohammed is accused of multiple deadly attacks in Kashmir, including the 2019 bombing of an Indian military convoy that brought the two countries into a brief conflict. It was also behind a deadly attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.
What were the targets of India’s recent strikes?
India’s military forces said that they had struck nine locations in Pakistan early Wednesday morning, including facilities associated with the two terrorist outfits.
The two sides had widely different claims about how many people were killed and the extent of any damage to the groups’ infrastructure. Those claims could not be independently verified.
Indian officials, briefing lawmakers, said that they had killed about “100 terrorists” in their strikes. The Pakistani military put the number of deaths at 31.
On the ground, it was clear that many of the strikes had hit facilities associated with the two terrorist groups, though it was not clear whether the facilities were current or old.
In Bahawalpur, in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, a strike on a compound associated with Mr. Azhar killed 13 people, including 10 members of Mr. Azhar’s family. It was the deadliest of the strikes.
Another strike in Muridke, a town about 25 miles from the Pakistani city of Lahore, hit a building complex previously used as Lashkar-e-Taiba’s headquarters, killing three people. But Pakistani officials said that they had taken over the building in 2019 after they had banned another Lashkar front outfit.
Four other sites targeted were said to be small seminaries and mosques linked in the past with the militant groups, in Punjab and in the Pakistan-administered part of Kashmir.
Showkat Nanda
Reporting from Kashmir
The disputed territory of Kashmir is breathing a sigh of relief, especially in the border areas that faced heavy shelling in recent days. People are happy and calling each other to share the news of the cease-fire. Some of the families who had abandoned their homes because of the shelling, which took more than a dozen lives on the Indian side alone, are now getting ready to go back.
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The military conflict played out in an environment of hypernationalism in India, where many people who called for de-escalation on social media over the past few days were trolled, doxxed and had their patriotism questioned. One journalist whose phone number was leaked and who received threats in response to his posts about de-escalation wrote on X: “Now please go find Donald Trump’s phone number.” Another asked: “De-escalation is cool now?”
For most of his decade in power, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has kept an aggressive stance on Pakistan, trying to squeeze and isolate it. His support base seemed satisfied with the military action that ended on Saturday. “We had voted for a strongman, and he has proved himself,” said Manoj Misra, a supporter of Modi in the city of Lucknow.
In India, questions were beginning to be asked about whether the military action had done anything to achieve India’s stated goal of deterring terrorist threats from Pakistan. “We have left India’s future history to ask what politico-strategic advantages, if any, were gained,” Ved Prakash Malik, a former Indian Army chief, said on X.
In a sign of easing tensions, Pakistan reopened its airspace for all flights on Saturday afternoon, its airports authority said. The airspace had been closed in the early hours of Saturday as the military confrontation with India intensified. The conflict has forced airlines to avoid flying over the region, and the resulting delays have affected travelers around the world. Before the current tensions, almost 700 flights crossed over Pakistan every day. On Wednesday, after India launched strikes against Pakistan, that number fell to just 18, according to Flightradar24.
Pakistan International Airlines, the country’s flagship carrier, announced that with the reopening of Pakistan’s airspace, flight operations were resuming across the network. The airline said all aircraft and equipment that had been relocated to secure sites as a precautionary measure had now been returned to their regular operational areas.
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The most recent outbreak of violence between India and Pakistan included attack drones, a new and worrying style of warfare, experts said. The development reflects the proliferation of the devices in combat worldwide.
Both India and Pakistan have been developing their respective drone-building industries in recent years, and both import drones from foreign allies. Most of what was deployed amid the latest conflict, after an attack in the disputed Kashmir region, appeared to be one-way Kamikaze drones. They became ubiquitous in the war in Ukraine and are all but certain to be a standard weapon on battlefields going forward.
James Patton Rogers, a drone warfare expert at Cornell University, noted that drones generally are used as the lowest possible escalatory step in a conflict, usually to pressure and probe an opponent’s air defenses.
At least 118 countries currently have drones in their arsenals, up from about 60 nations in 2010 that either had or were considering them, Mr. Rogers said.
Pakistan probably has a limited number of drones, he said, although it has developed several attack drones and also so-called loitering munitions, like the kamikaze drones. It also imports armed drones from China and, as recently as last year, from Turkey, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
India’s drone industry is far more sophisticated, Mr. Rogers said, and includes ground, air and sea drones. He said it also buys them from Israel.
Shuja Nawaz, the former director at The Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, said both India and Pakistan had appeared to be using the drones to scout the positions of each other’s weapons systems and test their response times. He said both had refused to recognize international rules governing sovereign airspace.
Mujib Mashal contributed reporting.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, said the cease-fire was a “vital step toward de-escalation” between India and Pakistan. “All efforts must be made to ensure it is respected,” she said on social media.
As U.S. officials take credit for the cease-fire, it is notable that Secretary of State Marco Rubio singled out the involvement of Vice President JD Vance. Just 48 hours ago, Vance had said on Fox News that while the United States could encourage the two sides to de-escalate, “we’re not going to get involved in the middle of a war that’s fundamentally none of our business and has nothing to do with America’s ability to control it.”
Rubio spent the night working the phones in what one U.S. official described as “shuttle diplomacy,” going back and forth between Indian and Pakistani officials.
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Vance spoke with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, a person close to the vice president said. Vance recently made a visit to India, where he met with Modi.
Before their latest military conflict started on Wednesday, Pakistan and India had already downgraded diplomatic relations, closed off airspace and restricted visas to each other’s citizens. India had also pulled out of a water-sharing treaty between the two countries that is vital for Pakistan’s agriculture. It’s unclear if a military cease-fire will do anything to reverse those actions.
The last time that India and Pakistan fought with enough intensity that anyone called it a war was in 1999, when their forces clashed in the Kargil region of Indian-controlled Kashmir. At the time, the world was riveted, and terrified, by the idea of two nuclear-armed powers fighting each other directly. Both countries had just announced their nuclear arsenals, in 1998. This week, less was said about the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse. That may be because 26 years have passed, or because Russia and Israel, both nuclear-armed, are engaged in bloody wars at the same moment.
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India’s strong statement that the cease-fire had been negotiatated directly between Indian and Pakistani officials is less about minimizing the roles that the U.S. and others played and more about longtime Indian policy. India has tried to keep issues relating to Pakistan, particularly the disputed territory of Kashmir, as bilateral. It does not like talk of the U.N. or others getting involved.
Many of the technical details of the aerial engagements over the past four nights remain obscured by the fog of war. Accounts vary wildly over how many weapons were used, what kind they were and what damage they did. After the two countries’ last major engagement, in 2019, it took weeks before anyone could say with some certainty how many aircraft either side had shot down (it was one Indian jet, not two, as Pakistan had claimed; and no Pakistani jets, contrary to India’s claims).
One of the most intriguing technical details to be learned about last night’s exchange of fire concerns the type of land-based missiles that were fired across the border. In a Saturday morning briefing, an Indian military official said that a “high-speed missile” had been fired at an air base in the Indian state of Punjab. That unusual term may or may not be a reference to a ballistic missile. The use of any such missile would have been ominous: That is the surest method for Pakistan to deliver a nuclear payload to an Indian target.
India and Pakistan both claim Kashmir in full, but each controls only a part of it. A 460-mile long border called the Line of Control divides it. Kashmiris are used to artillery fire since India and Pakistan both have troops stationed there and shelling and small arms firing are common. But during this week’s conflict, many residents described nonstop shelling throughout the night and drone attacks. Many civilians died, suffered injuries or had to leave their homes.
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With the fighting now halted, the two sides are trying to shape perceptions of how they fared over four days of military conflict. Indian military officials, in a news conference that just ended, rejected Pakistani claims that several Indian air fields and defense systems had been hit. Instead, the Indian officials claimed extensive damage to Pakistani air fields and military facilties and to the country’s defense radar system. The claims and counter-claims will continue to dominate the discourse as it remains difficult to verify precise details.
Before the cease-fire deal, the armed conflict between India and Pakistan had entered new territory after decades of hostility. It was the first time that the two nuclear-armed countries had used drones to fight each other on a large scale. The drones’ use could reshape the way the world views any future hostilities between India and Pakistan — much as their development of nuclear weapons did in the 1990s.
The prominent role that the Trump administration is claiming in brokering a cessation of military hostilities between India and Pakistan comes as both countries have been bargaining with Washington over economic matters. On Friday, Pakistan was asking the International Monetary Fund for the extension of a vital loan worth billions of dollars. The United States has an outsize role in making such decisions. And India is negotiating a trade deal with the Trump administration after President Trump’s threat to impose punitive tariffs.
The two countries had been under diplomatic pressure to de-escalate their conflict, which started on Wednesday and quickly ratcheted up. On Thursday, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries sent diplomats to meet with leaders from both sides. Gulf states, including Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, have close ties with both Pakistan and India.
The cease-fire announcement came after a night of some of the heaviest military engagement between the two sides since the rising tensions broke into military confrontation on Wednesday. Following two nights of heavy drone warfare that tested each other’s defense systems, both sides appeared to have inflicted heavy damage early Saturday as they targeted each other’s military bases.
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An Indian foreign ministry official said that the cease-fire agreement had been “worked out directly between the two countries.” In a brief address, India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, said the conversation between the two sides had started at 3:35 p.m. local time and that they had agreed to a cease-fire starting at 5 p.m. President Trump had said that the cease-fire came about “after a long night of talks mediated by the United States.”