Sawt Falasteen - Dozens killed as India, Pakistan clash in worst violence in decades

At least 36 deaths were reported. Islamabad said 26 civilians were killed by the Indian strikes and firing along the border, while New Delhi said at least eight died from Pakistani shelling.

Indian airforce officer Vyomika Singh said "nine terrorist camps were targeted and successfully destroyed", days after New Delhi blamed Islamabad for backing a deadly attack on the Indian-run side of disputed Kashmir.

The Indian army said "justice is served", with New Delhi adding that its actions "have been focused, measured and non-escalatory in nature".

Pakistan's Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif accused Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of launching the strikes to "shore up" his domestic popularity, but said that Islamabad had struck back.

"The retaliation has already started", Asif told AFP. "We won't take long to settle the score."

Military spokesman Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry at a press conference in the capital Islamabad said Pakistan had downed five Indian jets across the border, including three French Rafale fighter aircraft, after they attacked Pakistan.

He added that a hydropower plant in Pakistan Kashmir was also targeted, damaging a dam structure.

An Indian senior security source, who asked not to be named, meanwhile said three Indian fighter jets crashed on home territory.

The wreckage of one was seen by an AFP photographer at Wuyan -- on the Indian controlled side of Kashmir.

- 'Shelling raining down' -

Twenty-one civilians were killed in the strikes, while five people were killed in gunfire at the border, the military said.

Four children, including two three-year-old girls, were among the dead.

In Muzaffarabad, the main city of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, troops cordoned off streets around a mosque Islamabad said was hit, with marks of explosions also visible on the walls of several homes.

Shortly after, India's army accused Pakistan of "indiscriminate" firing across the Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border in Kashmir, with bursts of flame as shells landed, AFP reporters saw.

"We woke up as we heard the sound of firing", Farooq, a man in the Indian town of Poonch, told the Press Trust of India news agency from his hospital bed, his head wrapped in a bandage. "I saw shelling raining down... two persons were wounded".

At least eight Indians were killed and 29 others wounded in the town, local revenue officer Azhar Majid told AFP from the town's hospital.

India had been widely expected to respond militarily to the April 22 attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir by gunmen it said were from Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba, a UN-designated terrorist organisation.

The assault in the tourist hotspot of Pahalgam left 26 people dead, mainly Hindu men.

No group has claimed responsibility but New Delhi has blamed Islamabad for backing the attack, sparking a series of heated threats and diplomatic tit-for-tat measures.

Pakistan rejects the accusations and called for an independent probe.

The two sides have exchanged nightly gunfire since April 24 along the LoC, according to the Indian army. Pakistan also said it has held two missile tests.

- 'Maximum restraint' -

The South Asian neighbours have fought multiple wars since they were carved out of the sub-continent at the end of British rule in 1947.

The latest violence already exceed India's strikes in 2019, when New Delhi said it had hit "several militants" after a suicide bomber attacked an Indian security force convoy, killing 40.

"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," US-based analyst Michael Kugelman said.

Diplomats have piled pressure on leaders to step back from the brink of war.

"The world cannot afford a military confrontation between India and Pakistan," the spokesman for UN chief Antonio Guterres, Stephane Dujarric, said in a statement.

US President Donald Trump told reporters in Washington he hoped that the fighting "ends very quickly".

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spoken to top security officials in both New Delhi and Islamabad since the strikes and said he was monitoring the situation "closely".

India's army said it had "demonstrated considerable restraint in selection of targets and method of execution", adding that "no Pakistani military facilities have been targeted".

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, calling the Indian attack "unprovoked" and "cowardly", said the "heinous act of aggression will not go unpunished."

Rebels in Indian-administered Kashmir have waged an insurgency since 1989, seeking independence or a merger with Pakistan.

India regularly blames its neighbour for backing armed groups fighting its forces in Kashmir, a charge that Islamabad denies.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is expected in New Delhi on Wednesday, two days after a visit to Islamabad, as Tehran seeks to mediate.

India was also set to hold several civil defence drills Wednesday, while schools in Pakistan Punjab and Kashmir were closed, local government officials said.

The strikes came just hours after Modi said that water flowing across India's borders would be stopped. Pakistan had warned that tampering with the rivers that flow from India into its territory would be an "act of war".

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P.Tamimi--SF-PST