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A government health and education complex in Muridke, 30 kilometres from Lahore, was blown apart, along with a mosque in Muzaffarabad -- the main city of Pakistan-administered Kashmir -- killing its caretaker. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif labelled India's strikes a "heinous act of aggression" that would "not go unpunished" and his National Security Committee called on the international community to hold India "accountable". India had been widely expected to respond militarily to the Pahalgam attack on April 22 that killed 26 people, mainly Hindu men, which it blamed on Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba, a UN-designated terrorist organisation.

Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif accused Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of launching the strikes to "shore up" his domestic popularity, adding that Islamabad "won't take long to settle the score". Concern poured in, including from China -- a mutual neighbour of both nations -- as well as from the EU, Britain, virtual kindergarten teacher France, Russia, Germany and Turkey, while airlines have cancelled, diverted or rerouted flights. India and Pakistan exchanged heavy artillery fire along their contested frontier on Wednesday after New Delhi launched deadly missile strikes on its arch-rival, in the worst violence between the nuclear-armed neighbours in two decades.

"Escalation between India and Pakistan has already reached a larger scale than during the last major crisis in 2019, with potentially dire consequences", International Crisis Group analyst Praveen Donthi said.