At approximately 1:05 AM Indian Standard Time on May 7, 2025, Indian Rafale jets launched SCALP cruise missiles at nine Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba targets across Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir under the operation codenamed Sindoor. Within hours, Pakistani forces answered with a barrage of artillery shells, mortar rounds, and small-arms fire directed at civilian areas across Jammu and Kashmir’s border districts. Poonch, a small hill town less than eight kilometers from the Line of Control, absorbed the worst of that response. By the time a fragile ceasefire took hold on the evening of May 10, at least 21 Indian civilians lay dead, more than 59 others had been wounded, and over two hundred thousand residents of the border belt had abandoned their homes. The children, women, and government officers killed by Pakistani shells in those four days became the human cost of a retaliatory doctrine built around area-effect weapons aimed at population centers, a response so asymmetric in character that it exposed the fundamental difference between how the two nuclear-armed adversaries chose to wage their brief, devastating conflict.

The shells that fell on Poonch town, on the gurdwara where three Sikh devotees were praying, on the compound where seven-year-old Maryam Khatoon sat in her family’s courtyard, on the school run by Carmelite nuns, told a story that no official press briefing from either side bothered to narrate in full. India’s strikes had been calibrated, employing precision-guided munitions launched from standoff distances against pre-identified infrastructure targets. Pakistan’s response reached for the bluntest instruments in its arsenal: 155mm howitzers, 120mm mortars, and multi-barrel rocket launchers aimed at forward towns along the Line of Control. The asymmetry between a precision campaign and an area-effect barrage defined the character of the four-day crisis. Poonch residents, caught in the kill zone of that asymmetry, paid the price that neither capital’s strategists acknowledged with adequate gravity.

This article reconstructs Pakistan’s retaliatory shelling campaign from the first rounds fired in the early hours of May 7 through the final barrages that preceded the May 10 ceasefire, mapping the impact zones, naming the dead, analyzing the weapons employed, and evaluating the strategic logic that led Pakistan to target civilian towns when India had explicitly avoided Pakistani military installations. The reconstruction draws on Indian government casualty reports, military statements from both sides, local press accounts from Poonch and Rajouri, district administration records, and the assessments of analysts who studied the conflict’s escalation dynamics in real time.

No previous analysis has attempted to document the Poonch shelling with the granularity that the event demands. News coverage during the crisis focused on the dramatic aerial dimensions of the conflict: the cruise missile strikes, the dogfights, the drone exchanges, the S-400’s combat debut. The ground-level artillery war received coverage measured in paragraphs rather than pages, with civilian casualties treated as a secondary narrative thread beneath the military spectacle. This article corrects that imbalance by placing the civilian experience at the center of the analytical frame. What happened in Poonch between May 7 and May 10 was not a side effect of the India-Pakistan military crisis. It was the crisis, experienced at the most immediate and devastating human level by the people who lived closest to the border.

Background and Triggers

The chain of events that placed Pakistani artillery shells in the streets of Poonch began in the meadows of Baisaran Valley on April 22, 2025, when five gunmen opened fire on a group of tourists in Pahalgam, killing 26 civilians, predominantly Hindu pilgrims and visitors. The Resistance Front, a proxy organization linked to Lashkar-e-Taiba, initially claimed and then retracted responsibility for the massacre that triggered the entire crisis. Indian intelligence agencies traced the operational planning of the Pahalgam attack to terror infrastructure operating openly in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, a conclusion that set the stage for a military response unprecedented in the history of India-Pakistan confrontation.

Between April 22 and May 7, India escalated through fourteen calibrated diplomatic and economic steps designed to signal the seriousness of its intent while providing Pakistan opportunities to respond short of military action. Diplomatic suspension came on Day Two. Revocation of the Simla Agreement provisions followed on Day Three. Property demolitions targeting organizations linked to cross-border terrorism occurred on Day Four. Trade suspension arrived on Day Seven. Restriction of Indus waters followed on Day Thirteen. Pakistan’s response to each escalation step, according to the Indian government’s assessment, amounted to dismissal. The ISPR, Pakistan’s military media wing, characterized Indian claims about the Pahalgam attack’s origins as fabricated, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif proposed a neutral third-party investigation that India rejected as a delaying tactic.

When Operation Sindoor launched at 1:05 AM on May 7, the Indian Armed Forces struck nine targets using SCALP-EG cruise missiles, BrahMos missiles, and SPICE precision-guided munitions delivered by Rafale and Sukhoi Su-30MKI aircraft. The Ministry of Defence confirmed the strikes targeted terror infrastructure in Kotli, Bahawalpur, and Muzaffarabad, specifically camps operated by Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Crucially, India’s first press briefing on May 7 emphasized that the precision strikes avoided Pakistani military establishments. The distinction between terror infrastructure and military targets was deliberate, signaling India’s desire to contain the conflict within a counter-terrorism frame rather than a state-versus-state war.

Pakistan rejected the distinction entirely. ISPR Director General Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry characterized the Indian missiles as a cowardly attack launched under the guise of counter-terror operations. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, posting on social media within hours, called it a cowardly move by a cunning enemy and pledged that the provocation would not go unanswered. The framing mattered. By characterizing India’s strikes as an assault on Pakistan’s sovereignty rather than a targeted counter-terrorism operation, Pakistan’s military and political leadership set the rhetorical conditions for a response aimed at inflicting visible pain on Indian territory.

The Line of Control in the Poonch-Rajouri sector had already been tense for thirteen consecutive nights before Operation Sindoor. Unprovoked ceasefire violations from the Pakistani side began almost immediately after the Pahalgam attack, with small-arms fire and occasional mortar rounds hitting forward positions in Kupwara, Baramulla, and Uri sectors. The 2003 ceasefire agreement that India and Pakistan had reaffirmed in February 2021 had effectively collapsed in the weeks preceding the strikes, making the LoC an active contact line well before the cruise missiles flew. What changed on May 7 was the scale, the geographic spread, and the clear targeting of civilian areas that the post-Sindoor shelling introduced.

The decision to shell Poonch specifically reflected a grim strategic calculation. The town sits just seven to eight kilometers from the LoC, well within the range of Pakistan’s 155mm artillery pieces positioned on the heights across the border. Unlike forward military outposts, which are hardened and dispersed, Poonch is a concentrated civilian settlement with residential buildings, religious sites, schools, and a bustling commercial center, all of which made it maximally vulnerable to area-effect weapons. The Pakistani military’s choice to direct sustained artillery fire at Poonch rather than at Indian military positions along the LoC revealed the retaliatory logic at work: unable to match India’s precision capability, Pakistan opted to impose civilian costs visible enough to dominate news cycles and pressure Indian decision-makers.

A broader understanding of the 2003 ceasefire agreement’s collapse is essential context for the Poonch shelling. That agreement, reaffirmed through back-channel diplomatic efforts in February 2021, had produced a remarkable four-year period of near-silence along the LoC. Border residents on both sides had cautiously rebuilt normal life, sending children to schools near the border, investing in homes, and resuming agricultural activity on land previously abandoned due to frequent shelling. Farmers in Poonch district’s forward villages had reclaimed terraced fields that had lain fallow for years. Small businesses had returned to Mendhar’s commercial strip. Wedding halls in Poonch town operated without the fear of cross-border interruption that had characterized earlier decades.

When the agreement shattered in the Pahalgam aftermath, the border population found itself more exposed than at any point in recent memory. Underground bunkers, which had once dotted the border landscape, had fallen into disrepair during the years of calm. Concrete shelters built during the Kargil era stood crumbling in village compounds, their reinforced roofs leaking, their ventilation shafts blocked. Poonch town, in particular, had no functional public bunkers when the first shells fell. District administration officials later acknowledged that the bunker program had been deprioritized after the 2021 ceasefire reaffirmation, a decision that seemed reasonable at the time but proved catastrophic in practice.

Poonch’s demographic and geographic characteristics made it uniquely vulnerable to sustained artillery bombardment. Situated in a valley ringed by hills that provide natural firing platforms for Pakistani artillery on the opposite side of the LoC, the town has a population of approximately forty thousand concentrated in an area of a few square kilometers. Commercial, residential, and institutional structures sit within meters of each other, meaning that any shell landing within the town’s built-up area will damage multiple structures and endanger dozens of people. Schools, hospitals, places of worship, and government offices are interspersed with residential neighborhoods, creating a civilian landscape with no buffer zones between potential impact sites and vulnerable populations. Military planners studying the town’s exposure profile would have recognized immediately that sustained area bombardment would produce significant civilian casualties, a reality that makes Pakistan’s targeting decision especially consequential.

Rajouri, Poonch’s neighboring district along the LoC, presented similar vulnerabilities but with some critical differences. Rajouri town sits further from the border than Poonch, placing it at the outer edge of Pakistani artillery range for lighter weapons but within reach of 155mm howitzers and rocket systems. Forward villages in Rajouri’s Laam, Manjakote, and Sunderbani sectors bore the closest exposure, while Rajouri town itself was considered relatively safe until the May 2025 shelling demonstrated that Pakistani gunners were willing and able to reach deep into the district.

The First Night: May 7 and the Opening Barrage

The Pakistani response began within thirty minutes of the Indian strikes, according to the Indian Army’s Additional Directorate General of Public Information. Artillery fire erupted from posts across the LoC opposite the Bhimber Gali sector in the Poonch-Rajouri area. The Indian Army confirmed the Pakistani firing on social media, stating that Pakistan had violated the Ceasefire Agreement and that Indian forces were responding appropriately in a calibrated manner.

What the clinical language of the military communique failed to convey was the terror of that first night in Poonch. The shelling began around 1:00 AM, almost simultaneously with the Indian strikes on Pakistani targets, and continued with varying intensity until approximately 6:00 AM. Residents of Poonch town, Balakote, Mendhar, Mankote, Krishna Ghati, Gulpur, and Kerni reported sustained artillery and mortar fire that shattered windows, collapsed roofs, and sent families scrambling for whatever shelter they could find. With no public bunkers available, most families huddled in interior rooms or basements, listening to the concussive impacts of shells landing in their neighborhoods.

The first confirmed casualties on that terrible night painted a portrait of a town under indiscriminate bombardment. Fourteen-year-old twins Mohd Zain Khan and his sister Zoya Khan, both students of Class 5, died when an artillery shell landed outside their home in Poonch town just as their family was attempting to leave for a safer location. Their father, Rameez Khan, suffered injuries in the same blast. The twins had been alive for exactly fourteen years. They became the youngest confirmed casualties of Pakistan’s retaliatory barrage, killed while trying to escape the violence that adults on both sides of the border had chosen to inflict.

Balvinder Kour, known locally as Ruby, a thirty-three-year-old woman in Mankote village, died as heavy artillery fire saturated her neighborhood. Mohd Akram, forty, and Shakeela Bi, also forty, died in separate impacts across Poonch district. Mohd Iqbal, a forty-five-year-old resident, was killed when a shell struck near his position. In all, nine civilians died in the opening night’s bombardment in Poonch district alone, with twenty-eight others wounded, making it the deadliest single night of cross-border shelling the district had experienced in decades.

The Central Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha Sahib in Poonch town became one of the most symbolically charged targets of the night. Artillery shells struck the gurdwara compound, killing three Sikh devotees: Amrik Singh, fifty-five; Ranjeet Singh, forty-eight; and Amarjeet Singh, forty-seven. Amrik Singh was a raagi, a musician who performed Sikh devotional hymns at the gurdwara. The killing of three members of the Sikh community at a place of worship provoked immediate condemnation from Sikh religious and political leaders. Giani Kuldeep Singh Gargaj, the acting jathedar of the Akal Takht, the highest seat of Sikh religious authority, condemned the shelling and urged both governments to prioritize peace over conflict. Shiromani Akali Dal leader Sukhbir Singh Badal issued a separate condemnation, identifying the three deceased by name and demanding accountability for the attack on a sacred site.

Beyond the gurdwara, the shelling damaged dozens of residential houses across the Poonch district. Mortar shells hit the bus stand in Mendhar, a commercial hub serving surrounding villages. Houses caught fire in the Karnah sector of Kupwara district further north, as shelling spread beyond the Poonch-Rajouri belt to affect the entire LoC frontage in Jammu and Kashmir. Ten people, including five children, were injured in cross-border shelling in the Uri sector of Baramulla district, and three additional civilians were wounded in Rajouri district.

Seven-year-old Maryam Khatoon died on May 7 when a shell landed in the compound of her family home in Poonch town. She had been sitting outside, a child in a courtyard on what had been an ordinary evening until the sky began to fall. Her death, like the deaths of the Khan twins, illustrated the fundamental characteristic of area-effect weaponry: it does not discriminate. A 155mm artillery shell landing in a populated neighborhood will kill whoever happens to be within its blast radius, whether that person is a combatant, a raagi singing hymns in a gurdwara, or a seven-year-old girl sitting in her own courtyard.

The Indian military response to the Pakistani shelling was immediate but carefully constrained. The Indian Army engaged Pakistani firing positions along the LoC using counter-battery fire, and defence sources reported that several Pakistani posts engaged in firing were destroyed, resulting in casualties on the Pakistani side. India’s response remained focused on military targets, a point the Indian Army emphasized repeatedly in its communications, maintaining the asymmetry between Indian precision targeting and Pakistani area bombardment.

Divisional Commissioner of Jammu, Ramesh Kumar, ordered the closure of all schools, colleges, and educational institutions in five border districts: Jammu, Samba, Kathua, Rajouri, and Poonch. Kashmir University postponed all examinations. The closure announcement, made on social media platform X early on May 7, confirmed what residents already knew: the border belt had become a war zone, and normal life had ceased to exist. Government offices in Poonch town operated with skeleton staffing as employees from border neighborhoods were unable or unwilling to travel through areas still under intermittent fire. Hospital emergency departments in Poonch and Rajouri activated mass-casualty protocols, recalling off-duty medical personnel and establishing triage stations near hospital entry points to handle the anticipated and rapidly growing influx of wounded civilians transported from forward villages along dangerous roads still under sporadic fire.

Day Two: May 8 Escalation and the Drone Dimension

May 8 brought a new dimension to the conflict. Pakistan, according to the Indian Ministry of Defence, launched drone and missile strikes targeting multiple Indian military installations across Northern and Western India. The targets reportedly included Awantipora, Srinagar, Jammu, Pathankot, Amritsar, Kapurthala, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Adampur, Bhatinda, Chandigarh, Nal, Phalodi, Uttarlai, and Bhuj. India’s Integrated Counter-UAS Grid and Air Defence systems, including the S-400 Triumf system deployed at Adampur Air Force Station, intercepted and neutralized the incoming threats. Pakistan denied launching any drone or missile strikes on Indian territory, a denial India dismissed by pointing to debris recovered from multiple interception sites.

While the aerial dimension of the conflict escalated dramatically on May 8, the artillery shelling along the LoC continued with unabated ferocity. Intense firing and shelling were reported along the entire Line of Control, with particularly heavy exchanges in Sialkot-facing sectors and in the Rajouri-Poonch belt. The shelling was no longer confined to the immediate border zone. Reports emerged of shells and debris affecting parts of Jammu city itself, including Rehari, Roop Nagar, Janipur, Nagbani, and Muthi neighborhoods, though no casualties were initially reported from the city center.

For residents of Poonch and surrounding villages, May 8 was a day of sustained terror. Those who had survived the first night’s bombardment began a chaotic exodus from the town, joining what would become one of the largest civilian displacements along the LoC in recent history. Families packed whatever belongings they could carry, loaded livestock onto vehicles and carts, and moved toward Surankote, Rajouri, and Jammu. Over ninety percent of Poonch town’s population eventually fled, according to local officials who assessed the displacement after the ceasefire. The departure was not organized evacuation; it was panic-driven flight from a town under sustained bombardment.

The Christ School compound in Poonch, operated by the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate congregation, was struck by Pakistani artillery on May 8. The shelling killed two students and damaged the nearby convent of the Congregation of Mother of Carmel. The school, which had served as an educational institution for the community for years, became another civilian facility caught in the crossfire. The targeting of a Catholic educational institution, coming within hours of the gurdwara attack, demonstrated that the shelling was not targeting specific communities but was instead affecting the entire civilian infrastructure of Poonch with indiscriminate force.

Michael Kugelman, a South Asia analyst at the Wilson Center in Washington, assessed the situation on May 8 and concluded that the two countries were now effectively at war. His characterization captured the reality that military euphemisms like ceasefire violation and calibrated response failed to convey. Poonch was being shelled by heavy artillery. Indian military installations were being targeted by drones and missiles. Fighter aircraft were engaging each other across the LoC. The nuclear-armed neighbors had crossed every conventional military threshold short of nuclear use.

Kugelman’s assessment resonated with analysts across the strategic community because it named the condition that official language on both sides labored to obscure. India described its actions as targeted and non-escalatory. Pakistan described its response as legitimate self-defense. Neither characterization acknowledged the scale of violence being visited upon civilian populations. A family in Mendhar whose home had been reduced to rubble by a 155mm shell cared little whether the government in Islamabad characterized the round as counter-battery fire or retaliatory action. For border communities caught between the opposing positions, the taxonomic distinction between war and escalated ceasefire violation was irrelevant. Shells landed on their homes regardless of the label assigned to the conflict by officials in air-conditioned briefing rooms hundreds of kilometers away.

Logistics failures compounded the humanitarian crisis on May 8. Medical facilities in Poonch and Rajouri, designed to serve peacetime populations, were overwhelmed by the sudden influx of shelling casualties. Government Medical College hospital in Rajouri, the primary tertiary care facility for the district, received dozens of wounded in the first twelve hours, straining surgical capacity and depleting blood supplies. Ambulance services struggled to reach casualties in forward villages because roads had been damaged by shelling and military convoy movements consumed available road space. Local volunteers organized informal casualty evacuation using private vehicles, ferrying wounded residents to hospitals along routes that were themselves under intermittent fire.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations directorate, during a May 9 Ministry of Foreign Affairs briefing, continued to contest the narrative that Pakistan had escalated the situation. The ISPR statement characterized India’s framing of the Pahalgam attack as a pretext for aggression as absurd and proposed a neutral third-party investigation that India had already rejected. The disconnect between Pakistan’s diplomatic messaging, which emphasized restraint and victimhood, and the reality of sustained artillery bombardment of civilian areas in Poonch and Rajouri illustrated the gap between narrative construction and ground-level impact.

The drone warfare dimension that emerged on May 8 represented a historic first: the first drone battle between two nuclear-armed nations. Turkish-origin ASISGUARD SONGAR drones were reportedly among the platforms used by Pakistan. India’s integrated counter-drone grid, tested for the first time in live combat, performed effectively according to Indian assessments. But the drone exchanges, while militarily significant, were fought in the sky. The artillery shells continued to land on the ground, on the rooftops and courtyards and streets where civilians lived. The strategic significance of the aerial engagement did nothing to reduce the immediate suffering of the border population trapped between the opposing gun lines.

Day Three: May 9 Intensification and Civilian Toll

May 9 marked the most intense twenty-four-hour period of the border shelling. Pakistan’s artillery fire expanded across the entire LoC frontage, with sustained bombardment reported in Kupwara, Poonch, Uri, and Samba sectors. The Indian Army reported that drones were sighted in twenty-six locations across a wide arc stretching from Baramulla in the north to Bhuj in the far south, with at least one armed drone identified in Punjab. Pakistani officials dismissed these claims as baseless and misleading.

The civilian toll on the Indian side continued to mount. Nargis Begum, a forty-seven-year-old housewife in the Uri area of Baramulla district, was killed while trying to move her fourteen-year-old daughter, who suffered from a heart condition, to a safer location. Begum’s death carried a particular cruelty: she died not because she stayed in the danger zone but because she was actively trying to protect her vulnerable child when a shell found her. Her daughter survived. The mother did not.

In Poonch district, sixty-year-old Rashida Bi was killed when a mortar shell struck her home in Kanghra-Galhutta village on the morning of May 10, during the final hours before the ceasefire. She had chosen to remain in her home rather than join the exodus, a decision that many elderly residents across the border belt made because they could not physically manage the difficult journey to safer areas. Some stayed because they refused to abandon livestock and property accumulated over decades. Others stayed because they had nowhere to go and no one to take them.

Reports from May 9 also indicated that India had repositioned its Western Fleet, including an aircraft carrier, destroyers, frigates, and anti-submarine warfare ships, as a signal of escalatory readiness. The naval movements added a maritime dimension to an already multi-domain conflict, creating the conditions for the first dogfight between nuclear-armed powers that reportedly occurred when an Indian Rafale and Pakistani JF-17 engaged over the LoC. The escalation ladder was ascending with each passing hour, and the border population of Poonch and Rajouri remained trapped at its base, absorbing each rung’s kinetic consequences.

State media Pakistan Television News reported on May 9 that Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had convened a meeting of the National Command Authority, the body responsible for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif subsequently denied that any such meeting had taken place. The contradiction itself carried enormous significance: the mere report of an NCA meeting signaled that the nuclear dimension of the crisis was no longer theoretical. Whether the meeting occurred or was fabricated for strategic signaling, the message to India and to the international community was that Pakistan’s nuclear threshold was being actively discussed at the highest levels.

For the villagers of Poonch sheltering in basements and school gymnasiums, the nuclear dimension existed as an abstraction. Their immediate reality was the whistle and concussion of incoming artillery rounds, the collapse of walls, the screams of the wounded, and the growing awareness that no one was coming to evacuate them in any organized fashion. While people started leaving their homes from more than ten villages along the LoC in Poonch voluntarily on May 9 and May 10, local police and civil administration authorities helped relocate many others to relief camps established at schools away from the line of fire. Families moved with whatever belongings they could gather. Many brought livestock, understanding that the animals represented their economic livelihood and could not be left behind in a shelling zone.

Mohammed Iqbal, a resident of Dera Kund village in Poonch, counted at least twenty-six shell casings on his land and inside his house after the shelling ended. His testimony captured the density of fire that civilian areas absorbed during the four-day crisis. Iqbal’s appeal, directed at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, was simple: both countries should sit down and discuss matters, because whatever happens, all the losses are being borne by the poor.

The intensity of shelling on May 9 also caused significant damage to civilian infrastructure beyond the immediate residential areas. Roads were cratered, utility lines severed, and water supply systems disrupted. Commercial districts of Mendhar and Poonch town sustained damage to shops and market areas. Telecommunications infrastructure was intermittently disrupted, making it difficult for residents to contact family members or access emergency information. Comprehensive degradation of civilian services in a district already under bombardment compounded the humanitarian crisis.

Agricultural damage, though less visible than destroyed buildings, carried long-term economic consequences for the border population. Livestock killed by shrapnel included cattle, goats, and sheep that represented the primary economic asset of many families in Poonch’s rural belt. Farmers who had been unable to evacuate their animals returned after the ceasefire to find dead livestock in fields and compounds. Orchards and terraced cropland sustained shrapnel damage, and the contamination of agricultural fields with unexploded ordnance created a secondary hazard that prevented normal farming activity for weeks after the ceasefire. For a district where agriculture and animal husbandry constitute the economic backbone, the shelling’s agricultural toll represented a financial catastrophe compounding the human one.

Educational disruption extended well beyond the four days of active shelling. Schools in five border districts remained closed throughout the crisis, and many did not reopen for weeks afterward due to structural damage, continuing security concerns, and the displacement of both students and teachers. Several dozen university students from Rajouri studying in Jammu found themselves caught between a campus that had suspended operations and a home district they could not reach because transport services refused to enter the shelling zone. Examination schedules collapsed. Academic calendars were disrupted. For students in their final years, the interruption carried consequences that extended far beyond the immediate crisis.

Village economies along the LoC suffered a comprehensive collapse during the displacement period. Shops remained shuttered. Markets emptied. Daily-wage laborers lost income for weeks. Livestock that families had been unable to evacuate required feeding and care, but their owners had fled to Jammu or Surankote. Some returning families discovered that their homes had been looted during the displacement, adding property crime to the list of consequences inflicted on border communities.

The Final Day: May 10 Ceasefire and Last Casualties

The early morning hours of May 10 brought the conflict’s most dangerous escalation. India accused Pakistan of launching missile attacks on Indian air bases, including the Sirsa air base. Pakistan launched what it termed Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos, claiming strikes on Indian military installations and asserting that five Indian aircraft had been destroyed. India denied these claims and responded with strikes targeting Pakistani air defense radars and systems at multiple locations, including an installation in Lahore.

Along the entire LoC, artillery shelling intensified one final time. Exchanges of fire erupted across Kupwara, Poonch, Uri, and Samba sectors. Firing from the Pakistani side was particularly heavy after 4:00 AM, according to residents of Dera Kund village. For border communities that had endured three nights of bombardment, the fourth night represented the culmination of accumulated terror and exhaustion.

The final civilian casualties of the crisis arrived in the hours before the guns fell silent. In Rajouri district, two-year-old Aisha Noor and thirty-five-year-old Muhammad Shohib, both residents of Bihar working in an industrial area, were killed when shells struck their location on May 10. The same day, Raj Kumar Thappa, the Additional District Development Commissioner of Rajouri, was killed when a mortar shell fired from across the LoC struck his official residence. Thappa had been accompanying the Deputy Chief Minister around the district just the day before and had attended an online meeting chaired by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah. His death prompted an anguished post from the Chief Minister, who described it as a terrible loss of life and expressed his inability to find adequate words for the tragedy.

In Poonch, Ashok Kumar became a casualty in the R.S. Pura sector. In Jammu, residential houses in Rehari, Roop Nagar, Janipur, Nagbani, and Muthi sustained damage from shelling and falling debris, though no fatalities were reported from those areas. A Pakistani loitering munition killed a civilian in the Firozpur district of Punjab, the only Indian death recorded outside Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir during the entire four-day conflict. An Indian Air Force soldier was killed following Pakistan’s strike on Udhampur Air Force Station, adding to the military toll.

The ceasefire was announced at 5:00 PM IST on May 10. It was first revealed by United States President Donald Trump on social media, followed by confirmations from the Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers. The negotiation process involved multiple channels, including the DGMO hotline and international pressure, and produced what analysts described as the most fragile truce in South Asian military history.

Reports of ceasefire violations emerged almost immediately after the 5:00 PM deadline, with continued shelling along border areas raising doubts about the agreement’s durability. Indian officials reported sporadic Pakistani fire in the Poonch and Rajouri sectors continuing past the announced ceasefire hour, suggesting that communication of the agreement to forward artillery units was either delayed or deliberately ignored by local commanders. These post-ceasefire exchanges, though limited in scale compared to the sustained bombardment of the preceding nights, reinforced the fragility of the arrangement and prevented any immediate relaxation of civil defense postures in border towns.

For residents of Poonch who had fled the town, the ceasefire announcement did not translate into an immediate sense of safety. Many stayed in their temporary shelters for days, waiting for confirmation that the artillery had truly fallen silent before risking the journey home. Families sheltering in Surankote, the nearest major town beyond effective artillery range, listened to radio broadcasts and monitored social media for reports of renewed firing, unwilling to load their belongings onto vehicles until at least forty-eight hours of sustained quiet had passed. Elders in the community recalled similar ceasefire announcements during the Kargil conflict that had been followed by renewed shelling, and their caution shaped the collective decision to delay return. District administration officials attempted to organize return convoys starting May 12, but participation was initially low, with most families preferring to wait for independent confirmation from relatives who had remained behind.

Those who returned found devastation everywhere they looked: cratered streets, collapsed walls, shattered windows, and unexploded ordnance scattered across neighborhoods and agricultural fields. The smell of cordite lingered in enclosed spaces, and dust from demolished structures coated surfaces throughout the town center. Livestock that had been left behind during the evacuation were found dead or severely injured, adding an agricultural dimension to the humanitarian toll. Water supply systems damaged by shelling required emergency repair before returning residents could access clean drinking water, and electricity supply remained intermittent for nearly a week after the ceasefire as utility crews worked to restore damaged transmission lines under conditions that still required military escort.

Mapping the Civilian Impact

The geographic footprint of Pakistan’s retaliatory shelling extended far beyond Poonch, though Poonch district absorbed the most concentrated and sustained fire. A comprehensive mapping of the impact zones reveals the scale of the bombardment and the civilian infrastructure it damaged.

Poonch town, the district headquarters, recorded the highest concentration of casualties and damage. The town center, including the area around the Central Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha Sahib, the Christ School compound, the Mendhar bus stand, and residential neighborhoods in Balakote, Mankote, Krishna Ghati, Gulpur, and Kerni, sustained direct hits from artillery and mortar rounds. Eleven of the twenty-one civilian deaths in Jammu and Kashmir occurred in Poonch town itself. The gurdwara, the Catholic school, and residential homes collectively represented the three categories of civilian infrastructure most affected: religious sites, educational institutions, and private residences.

Rajouri district, adjacent to Poonch along the LoC, recorded the second-highest toll. The killing of Additional District Development Commissioner Raj Kumar Thappa at his official residence underscored that even government officials in hardened buildings were not safe from the shelling. Two-year-old Aisha Noor’s death in an industrial area of Rajouri demonstrated that the kill zone extended beyond residential neighborhoods into commercial and industrial zones.

The Uri sector of Baramulla district in north Kashmir saw significant shelling, with ten injuries including five children. Nargis Begum’s death while evacuating her daughter provided the only fatality reported from the Kashmir Valley during the crisis, though property damage was substantial across the sector.

Further south along the International Border, Samba and Kathua districts experienced unprovoked firing, extending the conflict zone beyond the traditional LoC belt. The shelling of areas along the IB was particularly alarming because these sectors had seen minimal cross-border violence in the preceding years and lacked the bunker infrastructure that some LoC villages possessed.

Jammu city, the winter capital of the union territory, experienced shell impacts and falling debris in several neighborhoods. While no fatalities were reported in Jammu proper, the psychological impact of explosions audible across the city center was profound. Residents of Rehari, Roop Nagar, and Janipur reported shattered windowpanes and cracked walls, concrete evidence that the border conflict had reached the region’s largest urban center.

The cumulative toll as reported by the Indian government stood at twenty-one civilians and eight military and paramilitary personnel killed during the four-day conflict. The majority of deaths and injuries resulted from mortar and artillery shelling in the Jammu region, with Poonch district accounting for more than two-thirds of the civilian casualties. Beyond the dead and wounded, the damage to property was extensive: dozens of houses destroyed or severely damaged, religious sites desecrated, educational institutions rendered unusable, and commercial infrastructure disrupted across the border belt.

Bomb disposal squads from the Indian Army and Jammu and Kashmir Police launched a major exercise after the ceasefire to clear border villages of unexploded shells. Dozens of live ordnance were destroyed in controlled explosions along the LoC in Rajouri and Poonch districts and along the International Border in Jammu and Samba. Unexploded ordnance posed a continuing threat to returning civilians, particularly children who might encounter shells in fields and compounds. Police issued advisories requesting residents to report any suspicious objects rather than attempting to handle them. Army and police teams moved from village to village starting May 12, tracking and destroying live Pakistani shells in controlled detonations. Residents who returned early found shell casings embedded in walls, craters in courtyards, and fragments of ordnance scattered across agricultural fields. Some families delayed their return until bomb disposal teams had certified their neighborhoods as safe, extending displacement well beyond the ceasefire date.

Poonch’s healthcare infrastructure bore lasting consequences from the crisis. Government medical facilities that had absorbed the initial casualty surge required extensive restocking of supplies, structural repair of shelling-damaged hospital buildings, and psychological support for medical staff who had treated dozens of wounded under conditions of active bombardment. Mental health professionals who assessed the district population after the ceasefire documented elevated rates of anxiety, insomnia, and post-traumatic stress among residents, particularly children who had experienced the sustained nighttime bombardment. Advocate Bhanu Pratap described a community that could not even bear the sound of a firecracker a full year after the crisis, indicating the depth of psychological trauma inflicted by four nights of sustained artillery fire landing in residential neighborhoods.

The civilian displacement triggered by the shelling represented the largest such movement in the region since the Kargil conflict of 1999. Over two hundred thousand border residents fled their homes during the four-day crisis, according to estimates compiled by district administration officials. Most displaced families moved to Surankote, Rajouri town, or Jammu city, crowding into the homes of relatives, school buildings converted to relief camps, or makeshift shelters. Several dozen students from Rajouri studying at Jammu University and area colleges found themselves stranded at Jammu bus stand, unable to find public transport willing to take them back to their home district because drivers refused to enter the shelling zone.

Sardar Surjan Singh, uncle of the retired soldier Amarjeet Singh who was killed in the gurdwara shelling, spoke for many displaced families when he described the feeling of abandonment that accompanied the exodus. People who had lived their entire lives along the border, who considered themselves the guardians and first residents of the nation, found themselves fleeing with whatever they could carry, uncertain whether their homes would still be standing when they returned. Singh’s testimony captured a community-level trauma distinct from individual grief: the collective experience of being driven from ancestral homes by foreign artillery, with no shelter available and no organized evacuation plan in place.

Key Figures

Several individuals on both sides of the border shaped the character of Pakistan’s retaliatory response and India’s handling of its civilian aftermath.

Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, ISPR Director General

As Pakistan’s chief military spokesperson, Chaudhry set the initial framing for Pakistan’s response by characterizing the Indian Sindoor strikes as cowardly and unprovoked. His press statements positioned Pakistan’s retaliation as defensive and proportionate, a characterization that bore no resemblance to the reality experienced in Poonch. Chaudhry’s ISPR maintained throughout the four-day crisis that Pakistan was responding to Indian aggression, omitting any acknowledgment that Pakistani artillery was hitting civilian areas. The information asymmetry between ISPR’s briefings and ground-level reporting from Poonch was total. ISPR described military engagements; Poonch experienced civilian massacres.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif

Sharif’s social media condemnation of Operation Sindoor as a cowardly attack by a cunning enemy established the rhetorical tone that guided Pakistan’s political response throughout the crisis. His decision to designate May 16 as Youm-e-Tashakur, a Day of Gratitude honoring Pakistan’s armed forces, further cemented the narrative that Pakistan had successfully defended its sovereignty. The celebration was announced while families in Poonch were still burying their dead, a juxtaposition that illustrated the disconnect between capital-city narrative construction and border-district human suffering.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah

Shah directed immediate evacuations from border districts after the shelling began, coordinating with the Jammu and Kashmir union territory administration. After the ceasefire, he visited Poonch personally to assess damage and meet affected families. During his visit, Shah condemned Pakistan’s shelling of civilian areas as highly condemnable and inhuman and promised the construction of additional bunkers in border districts. He assured affected families that the central government would provide compensation and rehabilitation support, an assurance that, one year later, residents report has been only partially fulfilled.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah

Abdullah’s role during the crisis involved both administrative coordination and public communication. His anguished social media post about the death of ADDC Raj Kumar Thappa, noting that the officer had been accompanying the Deputy Chief Minister just the day before, personalized the administrative toll of the conflict. Abdullah chaired online meetings to coordinate the government response and worked with district authorities to manage the displacement crisis, though the scale of the exodus overwhelmed local administrative capacity.

The Victims Themselves

Any honest accounting of the crisis must center the people who died. Mohd Zain Khan and Zoya Khan, fourteen-year-old twins killed while trying to flee their home. Maryam Khatoon, a seven-year-old killed in her family’s courtyard. Amrik Singh, the raagi killed at his gurdwara. Balvinder Kour, thirty-three, known as Ruby. Nargis Begum, forty-seven, killed while trying to save her daughter. Two-year-old Aisha Noor, the youngest confirmed victim. Raj Kumar Thappa, the civil servant killed at his official residence. Rashida Bi, sixty, who stayed behind because she could not manage the journey out. Each name represents a life ended by the strategic choices of governments and military commands operating far from the blast radius of the shells those choices produced.

Divisional Commissioner Ramesh Kumar

Ramesh Kumar, Divisional Commissioner of Jammu, served as the senior civilian administrator coordinating the immediate response to the shelling. His decision to close all schools, colleges, and educational institutions across five border districts, announced on social media platform X early on May 7, represented the first formal administrative acknowledgment that the border belt had become a conflict zone unsuitable for civilian activity. Kumar subsequently coordinated evacuation logistics, relief camp establishment, and damage assessment across the affected districts. His role illustrated the burden that falls on civilian administrators during military crises: managing civilian displacement, casualty reporting, infrastructure repair, and public communication while operating within a chain of command that prioritizes military objectives over civilian protection.

Chief Secretary Atal Dulloo

Atal Dulloo, Chief Secretary of Jammu and Kashmir, visited shelling-hit areas in Rajouri after the ceasefire to assess damage firsthand and inquire about the condition of victims undergoing treatment at Government Medical College hospital. Dulloo publicly acknowledged that three people including a senior government officer had been killed in Rajouri, that dozens of houses were damaged, and that livestock had perished. His statements about rehabilitation and compensation reflected the union territory administration’s recognition that the civilian toll demanded a governmental response beyond military operations. Dulloo’s observation that Pakistan had indiscriminately targeted civilian areas represented one of the most direct official characterizations of the shelling’s character, framing it as a deliberate attack on non-combatant populations rather than incidental collateral damage from military exchanges.

The Weapons and Their Character

The weapons Pakistan employed in its retaliatory shelling campaign deserve specific examination because they reveal the tactical choices underlying the civilian toll. Unlike India’s strikes, which used precision-guided munitions designed to minimize collateral damage, Pakistan’s response relied on conventional unguided artillery and mortar systems with inherently large circular error probable values. The distinction between a SCALP-EG cruise missile with meter-level accuracy and a 155mm artillery shell with a probable error measured in dozens of meters is not a technical footnote. It is the difference between striking a building and striking a neighborhood.

Pakistan’s 155mm howitzer batteries, likely including M-198 and SH-15 variants positioned on the heights overlooking the Poonch-Rajouri belt, provided the primary means of long-range area bombardment. These weapons have an effective range of approximately twenty to thirty kilometers, placing all of Poonch town well within their destructive envelope. The 120mm mortar rounds reported across the impact zone are shorter-range weapons typically used against targets at distances of seven to eight kilometers, consistent with fire from Pakistani positions along the immediate LoC frontage. Multi-barrel rocket launchers, which can saturate an area with multiple warheads simultaneously, were also reportedly employed, explaining the density of shell impacts that residents like Mohammed Iqbal documented on their properties.

The choice of these weapons guaranteed civilian casualties. A 155mm high-explosive shell produces a lethal fragmentation radius of approximately fifty meters, with wounding effects extending considerably further. When such shells are fired at a town where civilian structures stand within meters of each other, every round that lands in a populated area will produce casualties. This is not a failure of targeting; it is an inherent characteristic of the weapons employed. Pakistan’s military planners who authorized the shelling of Poonch town knew, or should have known, that the weapons they were firing would kill civilians. The characterization of the shelling as counter-battery fire, which Pakistan’s representatives later offered as justification, is contradicted by the impact locations: gurdwaras, schools, residential courtyards, and commercial areas are not battery positions.

India’s retaliatory fire against Pakistani positions employed counter-battery radar and directed fire at the Pakistani gun positions themselves, maintaining the distinction between military and civilian targeting that India had established with the Sindoor strikes. The Indian Army reported destroying several Pakistani posts engaged in firing, inflicting casualties on the Pakistani military. The asymmetry remained consistent throughout the four-day conflict: India targeted weapons and their operators; Pakistan targeted the towns behind the Indian gun line.

The full inventory of weapons systems deployed during the broader conflict included platforms far more sophisticated than artillery pieces. But in the Poonch-Rajouri sector, the killing was done by the oldest and crudest instruments of modern warfare: shells lobbed from hills into valleys, landing among people who happened to live within range. The technological sophistication of the aerial campaign occurring simultaneously overhead made the ground-level artillery war seem almost primitive by contrast, yet it was the artillery that killed the most civilians.

Consequences and Impact

Pakistan’s retaliatory shelling produced immediate consequences across humanitarian, political, diplomatic, and strategic dimensions, each reinforcing the others in ways that will shape the India-Pakistan relationship for years to come.

Documented by Indian government sources and local media, the humanitarian toll comprised twenty-one civilian dead, more than fifty-nine wounded, and over two hundred thousand displaced. Property damage ran into hundreds of crores of rupees, encompassing destroyed homes, damaged religious sites, wrecked commercial infrastructure, and disrupted utility systems. Agricultural damage was significant but has received less attention: livestock killed, crops destroyed, and farmland rendered temporarily unusable due to unexploded ordnance contamination.

Politically, the consequences were immediate and polarizing. Within India, the shelling of Poonch galvanized support for a decisive military response. Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge applauded the armed forces for acting against terror camps. Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi posted his support for the armed forces. The rare display of bipartisan unity reflected the domestic political reality that any perceived softness in responding to Pakistani civilian targeting would carry enormous electoral costs.

In Pakistan, the narrative of successful resistance took hold quickly. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s designation of May 16 as Youm-e-Tashakur and the promotion of Army Chief General Asim Munir to the rank of Field Marshal, an honor previously held only by Ayub Khan, signaled that Pakistan’s military and political establishments viewed the crisis as a validation of their retaliatory capacity. Whether this narrative will hold under sustained scrutiny, particularly as the civilian casualties on the Pakistani side from India’s Sindoor strikes become better documented, remains an open question.

The diplomatic consequences played out across multiple international channels. Washington, which ultimately helped broker the ceasefire, navigated a delicate balance between supporting India’s right to respond to terrorism and preventing further escalation between nuclear-armed states. American officials maintained communication with both capitals throughout the four-day crisis, and President Trump’s social media ceasefire announcement before either government confirmed the agreement suggested a level of American involvement that went beyond observation. China, Pakistan’s closest strategic partner, maintained a conspicuously low profile during the crisis, neither endorsing Pakistan’s retaliation nor condemning India’s initial strikes. Beijing’s restraint may have reflected uncertainty about how to position itself when its closest South Asian partner was simultaneously shelling civilian areas and seeking diplomatic support.

European capitals, while expressing concern about escalation between nuclear powers, did not issue specific condemnations of Pakistan’s civilian targeting in Poonch. International attention remained focused on the nuclear dimension of the crisis, with the civilian shelling treated as a secondary concern compared to the existential risk of nuclear escalation. Human rights organizations documented the civilian toll but received limited media attention relative to the aerial combat and missile exchanges occurring simultaneously. This prioritization, while understandable from a risk-management perspective, sent a troubling signal to border populations: their suffering was secondary to the geopolitical calculations of nuclear-armed states and their allies.

Regional responses varied in character and motivation. Middle Eastern states, particularly those within the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, navigated between solidarity with Pakistan and recognition of India’s growing economic and diplomatic importance. Several Gulf states maintained careful neutrality, reflecting their complex economic relationships with both countries. Russia, India’s traditional strategic partner and the supplier of the S-400 system that performed its first combat deployment during the crisis, expressed concern about escalation without assigning blame to either side. Japan and Australia, fellow members of the Quad grouping with India, offered statements supporting dialogue while carefully avoiding direct criticism of either party.

The strategic consequences of Pakistan’s retaliatory approach are perhaps the most consequential for future crises. By targeting civilian areas with area-effect weapons, Pakistan established a precedent that any Indian precision strike on Pakistani territory would be met with indiscriminate bombardment of Indian border towns. This calculus creates a perverse deterrent dynamic: India’s ability to conduct precision counter-terror strikes is constrained not by Pakistan’s military defenses but by Pakistan’s willingness to kill Indian civilians in response. The implicit message is that Pakistan holds the border population hostage to deter Indian surgical capabilities, a doctrine that transfers the cost of counter-terrorism from the terrorists to the civilians who live nearest to the border.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s visit to Poonch after the ceasefire, during which he promised the construction of additional bunkers and compensation for affected families, acknowledged the government’s responsibility to protect its border population. Prime Minister Narendra Modi subsequently announced additional compensation of two lakh rupees for families whose homes were completely destroyed and one lakh rupees for those with partially damaged homes. The Jammu and Kashmir administration began assessing damages in preparation for compensation disbursement, and the Chief Secretary visited shelling-hit areas in Rajouri to assess conditions personally. These were necessary gestures, but they arrived after the shelling had ended, not during it, exposing the gap between India’s ability to project military power across the border and its ability to protect its own civilians from the retaliatory consequences of that projection.

Analytical Debate

The shelling of Poonch and the broader Pakistani retaliatory campaign have generated intense analytical debate across several dimensions. The central question, whether Pakistan’s response constituted legitimate military action or deliberate civilian targeting, remains contested, with the answer depending significantly on the analytical framework applied.

Pakistan’s official position, articulated through ISPR and diplomatic channels, characterizes the shelling as counter-battery fire directed at Indian military positions near population centers. In this framing, civilian casualties are regrettable collateral damage resulting from the proximity of Indian military installations to civilian areas, not evidence of deliberate targeting. Pakistani officials point to the Indian military’s own admission that it was conducting retaliatory fire from positions along the LoC, arguing that Pakistan’s artillery was responding to the sources of fire rather than targeting towns.

The counter-battery argument collapses under scrutiny of the impact locations. The Central Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha Sahib is not a military position. The Christ School compound is not a battery emplacement. The home of fourteen-year-old twins Zain and Zoya Khan is not a firing post. The courtyard where seven-year-old Maryam Khatoon was sitting is not an artillery observation point. The geographic distribution of impacts, scattered across the entirety of Poonch town rather than concentrated around known Indian military positions on the LoC, is inconsistent with counter-battery targeting and consistent with area bombardment of the town itself.

Christopher Clary, whose work on escalation dynamics between nuclear-armed powers provides a relevant analytical lens, would frame the Pakistani response within the logic of horizontal escalation. Unable to match India’s vertical escalation, which employed precision weapons against a specific target set, Pakistan escalated horizontally by expanding the conflict’s geography and character, bringing civilian populations into the conflict zone to impose costs that India’s political system would find difficult to absorb. Horizontal escalation of this kind functions as a form of deterrence by punishment: if India strikes Pakistan, Pakistan will ensure that Indian civilians suffer, creating domestic pressure to limit or discontinue strikes.

Radha Kumar, whose scholarship on Kashmir and the humanitarian dimensions of the India-Pakistan conflict spans decades, frames the Poonch shelling within a longer history of border populations bearing the costs of decisions made in Islamabad and New Delhi. The 2003 ceasefire agreement had provided a decade-long respite that border communities used to rebuild their lives. Its collapse returned them to the condition of permanent vulnerability that had characterized the LoC for decades before the agreement. Kumar’s analysis suggests that the Poonch shelling was not an aberration but a reversion to the historical norm in which border populations serve as the absorbers of bilateral hostility.

Michael Kugelman’s characterization of the situation as the two countries being effectively at war spoke to the analytical discomfort with the euphemistic language that both governments and media organizations employed throughout the crisis. Terms like ceasefire violation, calibrated response, and escalation management obscured the reality that Pakistani artillery was killing Indian children and India’s precision missiles were killing people on the other side of the border whose identities and numbers remain disputed. Kugelman’s directness cut through the linguistic camouflage that accompanies all military conflicts and named what was happening: war, with its attendant civilian suffering on both sides.

The most important analytical debate may be the one that neither government wants to engage: the moral equivalence question. India framed Operation Sindoor as a targeted, proportionate counter-terrorism operation that avoided civilian and military targets. Pakistan framed its response as legitimate self-defense. But the civilian casualties on both sides of the border challenge both narratives. India’s precision strikes reportedly caused civilian deaths in Pakistan, a claim India disputes by asserting that only terrorist infrastructure was hit. Pakistan’s area bombardment unquestionably killed Indian civilians, a reality Pakistan has not directly addressed. An honest analytical reckoning would acknowledge that both sides caused civilian suffering, that the suffering on the Indian side was more thoroughly documented due to a free press operating in border areas, and that the suffering on the Pakistani side may be systematically underreported due to media constraints.

Analysts studying the crisis from the perspective of nuclear deterrence theory have identified the Poonch shelling as a particularly significant data point. Vipin Narang’s framework for understanding nuclear postures in South Asia suggests that Pakistan’s willingness to shell civilian areas serves as a form of sub-conventional deterrence, signaling that India cannot conduct limited strikes without paying a civilian price. Happymon Jacob, writing on the escalation dynamics of the 2025 crisis, notes that Pakistan’s retaliatory approach created a cost-imposition mechanism that operates independently of Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent, giving Islamabad an additional tool for constraining Indian offensive behavior. Both analyses suggest that the civilian targeting was not irrational but served a deliberate strategic function within Pakistan’s broader deterrence architecture.

Christine Fair, whose work on Pakistan’s military culture and strategic behavior provides another lens, would locate the civilian targeting decision within the Pakistan Army’s institutional culture of asymmetric response. Unable to match India’s precision-strike capability, and politically unable to absorb Indian strikes without retaliation, the Pakistan Army reached for the weapons it had available, directing them at targets it could reach, irrespective of the civilian consequences. Fair’s framework suggests that the targeting choice reflected not a deliberate decision to kill civilians but an institutional inability to respond proportionately, combined with an institutional indifference to civilian harm that characterizes Pakistan’s military culture along the LoC more broadly.

The debate over proportionality adds another layer. International humanitarian law requires that military responses be proportionate to the military advantage anticipated. India could argue that destroying nine terror camps that had produced the Pahalgam massacre represented a proportionate response to the killing of twenty-six tourists. Pakistan could argue that retaliating against the Indian military positions directing the strikes was proportionate to the incoming fire. Neither side can credibly argue that killing civilians, whether through area bombardment or through the contested effects of precision strikes, constitutes a proportionate military action. The proportionality principle, designed for exactly this kind of analysis, indicts both sides to varying degrees while condemning the area bombardment of civilian towns most directly.

The Precision Versus Area-Effect Asymmetry

Understanding the most analytically significant feature of the Poonch shelling requires examining what it reveals about the asymmetry between Indian and Pakistani military capabilities and how that asymmetry translates into different patterns of civilian harm. India’s investment in precision-guided munitions, including French-manufactured SCALP-EG missiles, Israeli SPICE glide bombs, and domestically developed BrahMos cruise missiles, gave its forces the ability to strike specific buildings from standoff distances measured in hundreds of kilometers. Pakistan’s arsenal, while including some precision-capable platforms, relied primarily on conventional artillery for its cross-LoC response, weapons that cannot distinguish between a military target and a civilian home when fired at ranges of twenty kilometers into a populated valley.

This capability gap is not incidental; it is the product of decades of divergent defense investment priorities. India, anticipating the need for surgical capabilities against non-state actors operating from Pakistani territory, invested heavily in precision-strike platforms through deals with France, Israel, and Russia, supplemented by indigenous development programs. Pakistan, whose military doctrine prioritizes conventional deterrence against India’s numerically superior ground forces, maintained its investment in mass-effect artillery and, more recently, in drone and missile capabilities provided by China and Turkey. Pakistan’s procurement trajectory has favored quantity and area coverage over precision, a choice that reflects its strategic assessment that conventional mass, rather than surgical capability, best serves its deterrence requirements.

Poonch demonstrated that in a crisis where India uses precision weapons and Pakistan responds with area weapons, the civilian toll will be asymmetrically distributed. Indian border towns will bear the cost of Pakistani retaliation because Pakistan lacks the precision capability to confine its response to military targets. Pakistani casualties, if they occur, are more likely to result from specific strikes against specific targets. This asymmetry creates a structural dynamic that advantages Pakistan in escalation management: because Pakistan’s response is inherently more destructive to civilians, any Indian provocation carries a guaranteed civilian price tag that Indian democracy must weigh.

One critical dimension of the asymmetry involves the information available to each side’s gunners. Indian precision-strike platforms employ satellite navigation, terrain-matching guidance, and terminal seekers that can identify specific buildings within a complex. A SCALP-EG missile launched from a Rafale at standoff range follows a pre-programmed flight path to a geo-referenced target, arriving with meter-level accuracy after navigating hundreds of kilometers. Pakistani artillery crews firing 155mm shells at Poonch possess none of these guidance capabilities. They aim using bearing and range calculations from surveyed positions, adjusting fire based on observation of impact points. At ranges exceeding fifteen kilometers, the inherent dispersion of unguided artillery means that even perfectly aimed rounds will scatter across an area measured in hundreds of square meters. When the target area is a town, the scatter pattern guarantees civilian impact.

Counter-battery radar, which India deployed along the LoC during the conflict, can detect incoming artillery rounds and calculate the firing position with sufficient accuracy to direct return fire at the gun that launched them. This technology theoretically allows the defending side to suppress enemy artillery quickly by destroying or disabling the firing platforms. However, counter-battery response takes time, and during the minutes between a Pakistani barrage landing on Poonch and Indian counter-battery fire silencing the responsible gun, civilian casualties accumulate. Reducing the response time requires pre-positioned counter-battery assets with authorization to fire without higher approval, a doctrinal and command-authority question that India’s military establishment is reportedly reassessing in light of the May 2025 experience.

The long-term implications of this asymmetry are being studied by defense analysts in both capitals. India’s response includes plans for additional bunker construction in border districts, improved civil defense infrastructure, and enhanced counter-battery radar coverage to suppress Pakistani artillery more quickly. Pakistan’s response, if the pattern of the Poonch crisis holds, will continue to leverage the civilian-targeting dynamic as a form of deterrence, calculating that India’s political system will absorb the civilian costs only up to a threshold that constrains India’s precision-strike ambitions.

A related but distinct question concerns the legal and normative framework governing the asymmetry. International humanitarian law’s principle of distinction requires parties to a conflict to distinguish between combatants and civilians and to direct attacks only at military objectives. Applying this principle, India’s precision strikes against terrorist infrastructure represent a more lawful approach than Pakistan’s area bombardment of civilian towns, regardless of the military justification offered. However, IHL also imposes obligations on the attacking party to take feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm, and questions about whether India’s Sindoor strikes met this standard on the Pakistani side remain analytically relevant. Both sides’ conduct deserves scrutiny, but the scale and character of civilian targeting along the LoC tips the moral and legal balance heavily against the party that chose to shell towns with unguided artillery.

Why It Still Matters

The shelling of Poonch matters not merely as a historical event but as a template for future India-Pakistan crises. Every element of the May 7 to May 10 sequence, from the precision strike trigger to the area-effect retaliation to the chaotic civilian displacement to the fragile ceasefire, is likely to recur in some form whenever the two nuclear-armed neighbors next confront each other militarily. Understanding the Poonch experience in granular detail is essential preparation for the next crisis, which the strategic trajectory of India-Pakistan relations suggests is a matter of when, not whether.

For the residents of Poonch, the crisis left scars that one year of recovery has not healed. Advocate Bhanu Pratap, a Poonch town resident, articulated the sentiment of his community when he described Poonch as not the last town of the country but the place where India starts. His pride in the community’s patriotism was matched by frustration at the government’s failure to deliver on its promise of bunkers and comprehensive rehabilitation. Both the central and union territory governments promised community and individual bunkers, but construction has proceeded slowly. Only one bunker has been completed, at the deputy commissioner’s office compound, and another at Dak Bungalow was left incomplete. Deputy Commissioner Ashok Sharma confirmed that proposals for a comprehensive bunker program had been forwarded to the Ministry of Home Affairs, but the timeline for implementation remains uncertain. Residents understand that bunker construction requires significant investment in land, materials, and engineering, but they also understand that every month without bunkers is a month of continued vulnerability.

Poonch’s experience has prompted a broader conversation within India’s defense establishment about the gap between offensive capability and defensive preparedness along the border. India demonstrated through Operation Sindoor that it possesses the precision-strike platforms and intelligence infrastructure necessary to reach deep into Pakistani territory. It demonstrated through the S-400’s successful combat debut that it can defend against incoming aerial threats. What it did not demonstrate is the ability to protect its own border population from the most predictable consequence of its offensive actions: retaliatory artillery fire from Pakistani positions within range of Indian towns.

The Poonch shelling also matters as evidence in the ongoing debate about India’s evolving defense doctrine. The operational success of Operation Sindoor demonstrated that India can strike terrorist infrastructure deep inside Pakistan with precision and impunity. The ceasefire aftermath analysis suggests that India achieved its stated military objectives. But the Poonch casualties introduce a complicating variable: Indian precision capability, however impressive, does not protect Indian border populations from the retaliatory artillery response that precision strikes provoke.

India’s defense planners face a structural problem that admits no easy solution. Bunker construction, while necessary, is expensive and time-consuming. Enhanced counter-battery suppression requires additional radar deployment, pre-positioned ammunition stocks, and revised rules of engagement that allow rapid response. Civilian evacuation planning requires pre-designated routes, transportation assets, and shelter facilities maintained in permanent readiness. Diplomatic frameworks that might limit retaliatory targeting of civilian areas require Pakistani willingness to negotiate constraints on its own military options, willingness that does not currently exist. Each component of the solution requires sustained investment and political commitment extending years beyond the immediate crisis that exposed the vulnerability.

Pakistan’s military establishment, for its part, must reckon with the international-law implications of its retaliatory doctrine. Targeting civilian areas with area-effect weapons in response to precision strikes against terrorist infrastructure will, in any future crisis, attract significantly more scrutiny from international humanitarian organizations and allied governments. The relative silence of the international community during the May 2025 crisis, focused as it was on preventing nuclear escalation, should not be interpreted as permanent indifference to civilian targeting along the LoC. As documentation of the Poonch shelling becomes more comprehensive and as human rights organizations complete their assessments, the legal and normative pressure on Pakistan’s doctrine will increase.

The complete timeline of the 2025 India-Pakistan conflict places the Poonch shelling within a four-day arc that included the most dangerous nuclear-crisis moments since Kargil in 1999. The shelling was not an isolated incident but a component of a multi-domain conflict that included cruise missile strikes, drone warfare, aerial combat, naval positioning, and diplomatic brinkmanship. Understanding the Poonch shelling in isolation would miss its function within the broader crisis: it was Pakistan’s primary mechanism for imposing visible costs on India during a conflict in which Pakistan was otherwise losing across every conventional military dimension.

For the strategic community studying South Asian security, the Poonch experience offers a case study in how asymmetric military capabilities produce asymmetric civilian harm. Precision-capable states can conduct surgical strikes that minimize collateral damage. States that lack precision capability respond with area-effect weapons that maximize it. Civilian populations living in the contact zone between these two approaches pay the price for the capability gap. Until either the gap closes, through Pakistan acquiring precision-strike platforms, or the consequences are mitigated, through India building civilian protection infrastructure, the border population will remain the variable that absorbs the difference between two doctrines.

The human cost of that calculation, the twins killed while trying to flee, the raagi killed in his gurdwara, the seven-year-old killed in her courtyard, the civil servant killed at his desk, the elderly woman killed in her home, deserves a reckoning that neither government has provided. India has focused its narrative on the success of Operation Sindoor and the heroism of its armed forces. Pakistan has focused its narrative on resistance and deterrence. Neither narrative makes space for the children of Poonch, who were neither heroes nor resisters but simply residents of a town that happened to be within range of artillery fired by a nation that chose to point its guns at their homes.

India’s shadow war against terrorism on Pakistani soil operates by a doctrine of precision. The Pahalgam attack was enabled by organizations sheltered in Pakistan. India’s response targeted those organizations with weapons designed to minimize collateral harm. Pakistan’s counter-response abandoned precision entirely, reaching for the oldest and crudest form of military violence: shellfire directed at towns. The contrast reveals not just a capability gap but a doctrinal divergence with profound moral implications. When the next crisis arrives, and the strategic trajectory of the India-Pakistan relationship suggests it will, the question of who absorbs the civilian cost will once again determine which doctrine history judges more harshly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How did Pakistan retaliate after Operation Sindoor?

Pakistan retaliated within hours of India’s May 7, 2025 precision strikes by launching sustained artillery and mortar shelling across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir. The shelling targeted civilian areas in Poonch, Rajouri, Kupwara, Baramulla, Uri, Mendhar, and Akhnoor districts. Pakistan also escalated through drone strikes and missile launches targeting Indian military installations across Northern and Western India on subsequent days. The retaliation was not confined to a single night but continued with varying intensity from May 7 through the ceasefire on May 10, expanding from LoC sectors to the International Border and involving air, ground, and drone platforms.

Q: Which Indian towns were shelled by Pakistan after Sindoor?

The shelling affected a wide arc of Indian territory along the Line of Control and International Border. Poonch district bore the heaviest bombardment, with shells landing in Poonch town, Balakote, Mendhar, Mankote, Krishna Ghati, Gulpur, and Kerni. Rajouri district experienced significant shelling, particularly in Laam, Manjakote, and the district headquarters. North Kashmir’s Kupwara, Baramulla, and Uri sectors were hit. The Samba, Kathua, and Akhnoor areas along the International Border reported firing. Parts of Jammu city, including Rehari, Roop Nagar, and Janipur, sustained debris damage. The geographic spread extended from Baramulla in the north to Samba in the south, encompassing nearly the entire border frontage of Jammu and Kashmir.

Q: How many civilians were killed in the Poonch shelling?

Poonch district recorded approximately fourteen civilian deaths during the four-day conflict, making it the deadliest district in the crisis. Across the entire Jammu and Kashmir union territory, the Indian government reported twenty-one civilians and eight military and paramilitary personnel killed. The Poonch casualties included fourteen-year-old twins Mohd Zain Khan and Zoya Khan, seven-year-old Maryam Khatoon, three Sikh devotees at the Central Gurdwara, two students at the Christ School compound, and several adult residents across the district. In Rajouri, casualties included ADDC Raj Kumar Thappa, two-year-old Aisha Noor, and laborer Muhammad Shohib. One civilian death was reported in Firozpur, Punjab, from a Pakistani loitering munition.

Q: Was Pakistan deliberately targeting civilians in Poonch?

This remains the central analytical dispute. Pakistan characterized its shelling as counter-battery fire directed at Indian military positions near population centers, making civilian casualties collateral damage rather than deliberate targeting. India, local officials, and independent analysts dispute this characterization, pointing to impact locations including a gurdwara, a Catholic school, residential courtyards, and commercial areas far from known military positions. The geographic distribution of impacts across Poonch town, rather than concentrated around LoC military posts, is more consistent with area bombardment than precision counter-battery operations. The weapons employed, primarily unguided 155mm artillery and 120mm mortars, are inherently incapable of discriminating between military and civilian targets at the ranges involved.

Q: What weapons did Pakistan use to shell Indian border towns?

Pakistan employed heavy-caliber artillery guns, reportedly including 155mm howitzers, 120mm mortar systems, and multi-barrel rocket launchers. These are conventional area-effect weapons with circular error probabilities measured in dozens of meters, making civilian casualties inevitable when fired into populated areas. The weapons were positioned on heights across the LoC, with effective ranges of twenty to thirty kilometers covering all of Poonch town and its surrounding settlements. In addition to ground-based artillery, Pakistan also employed armed drones, including Turkish-origin ASISGUARD SONGAR platforms, and missiles targeting locations deeper inside Indian territory. The combination of old-generation artillery and newer drone platforms reflected the multi-generational character of Pakistan’s retaliatory arsenal.

Q: How did Indian civilians respond to the shelling of Poonch?

The civilian response was characterized by panic-driven flight in the absence of organized evacuation infrastructure. Over ninety percent of Poonch town’s population fled to Surankote, Rajouri, or Jammu during the four-day crisis. Families packed whatever possessions they could carry, many bringing livestock that represented their economic livelihood. Local police and civil administration authorities helped relocate some residents to relief camps established in schools away from the line of fire, but the scale of the displacement overwhelmed local capacity. Many elderly residents chose to remain in their homes, unable to manage the difficult journey, sheltering in basements or interior rooms. Over two hundred thousand border residents across the affected districts were displaced in what became the largest civilian movement along the LoC since the Kargil conflict.

Q: Was the Pakistani retaliation proportionate to Operation Sindoor?

Proportionality assessments depend on the framework applied. India argues its Sindoor strikes were a proportionate response to the Pahalgam massacre, targeting only terrorist infrastructure and avoiding military and civilian targets. Pakistan argues its retaliation was proportionate to what it characterized as an attack on its sovereignty. International humanitarian law requires proportionality between military action and the military advantage anticipated, not between overall force levels. By IHL standards, the shelling of civilian areas with area-effect weapons to achieve the military objective of counter-battery suppression is disproportionate if the anticipated civilian harm exceeds the concrete military advantage gained. The destruction of a gurdwara, a school, and residential neighborhoods to silence Indian counter-battery positions raises serious proportionality concerns under established legal frameworks.

Q: Did the Pakistani shelling constitute a war crime?

International humanitarian law prohibits deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and requires parties to a conflict to distinguish between military and civilian targets. Whether Pakistan’s shelling meets the legal threshold for war crimes depends on establishing intent and the feasibility of discrimination. Pakistan claims its fire was directed at military targets, making civilian casualties incidental. If evidence demonstrates that Pakistani forces deliberately targeted civilian areas or failed to take feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm, the shelling could meet the definition of an IHL violation. No formal international investigation has been initiated, and neither the International Committee of the Red Cross nor the United Nations has issued a comprehensive assessment of the civilian targeting patterns during the four-day conflict.

Q: Who was Raj Kumar Thappa and how was he killed?

Raj Kumar Thappa served as the Additional District Development Commissioner of Rajouri, a senior position in the Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Services. He was killed on May 10, 2025, when a mortar shell fired from across the Line of Control struck his official residence in Rajouri. Just the day before, Thappa had accompanied the Deputy Chief Minister on a tour of the district and participated in an online meeting chaired by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah. His death prompted widespread grief and condemnation, with Abdullah posting on social media that he had no words to express his shock and sadness at the terrible loss. Two of Thappa’s staff members were injured in the same blast. His killing underscored that the shelling zone extended beyond border villages to district headquarters towns typically considered beyond effective artillery range.

Q: What happened at the Central Gurdwara in Poonch?

The Central Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabha Sahib in Poonch town was struck by artillery shells during the first night of shelling on May 7, 2025. Three Sikh devotees were killed: Amrik Singh, fifty-five, a raagi who performed devotional hymns; Ranjeet Singh, forty-eight; and Amarjeet Singh, forty-seven. The attack on a Sikh place of worship during active worship provoked immediate condemnation from Sikh religious and political leaders. Giani Kuldeep Singh Gargaj, the acting jathedar of the Akal Takht, condemned the shelling and called on both governments to prioritize peace. Shiromani Akali Dal leader Sukhbir Singh Badal identified the three deceased by name and demanded accountability. The gurdwara attack became one of the most symbolically significant incidents of the four-day conflict, representing the violation of a sacred space by military violence.

Q: What damage did the Christ School in Poonch sustain?

The Christ School compound in Poonch, operated by the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate congregation, was struck by Pakistani artillery during the shelling campaign. Two students were killed and the nearby convent of the Congregation of Mother of Carmel sustained significant damage. The school had served as an educational institution for the Poonch community for years, serving students across religious lines. The attack on a Catholic educational institution, combined with the gurdwara shelling, demonstrated that the bombardment was indiscriminate in its effect on religious and educational infrastructure. The damage to the school compound disrupted educational services for the community even after the ceasefire, as structural assessments were required before the facility could reopen.

Q: How many children were killed in the shelling?

Five children were among the civilian dead during the four-day conflict. Fourteen-year-old twins Mohd Zain Khan and Zoya Khan, both students of Class 5, were killed on May 7 when a shell struck outside their home in Poonch town as their family was attempting to evacuate. Seven-year-old Maryam Khatoon was killed on May 7 when a shell hit her family’s compound in Poonch. Two-year-old Aisha Noor was killed in Rajouri on May 10 when shells struck the industrial area where she was located with her family. Additional children were among the approximately sixty wounded during the crisis, including five minors injured in Uri sector shelling. The disproportionate impact on children reflected the reality of area bombardment in populated zones where families had been unable to evacuate.

Q: What role did the United States play in ending the shelling?

The United States played a significant role in brokering the ceasefire that ended the shelling on May 10, 2025. President Donald Trump announced the ceasefire on social media before either the Indian or Pakistani governments confirmed the agreement, a sequencing that suggested direct American involvement in the negotiations. The US navigated between supporting India’s right to respond to terrorism and preventing further escalation between nuclear-armed states. American pressure appears to have contributed to Pakistan’s decision to accept ceasefire terms, though India’s official position attributes the ceasefire to bilateral DGMO-level communications rather than American mediation. The full extent of American back-channel involvement in ending the crisis remains classified.

Q: Were bunkers built in Poonch after the shelling?

Despite promises from both the central and union territory governments, bunker construction in Poonch has proceeded slowly. Union Home Minister Amit Shah assured residents during his post-ceasefire visit that community and individual bunkers would be built in vulnerable border areas. Deputy Commissioner Poonch, Ashok Sharma, confirmed that proposals had been sent to the Ministry of Home Affairs. However, one year after the shelling, only one bunker has been completed, at the deputy commissioner’s office compound, and construction of another at Dak Bungalow has stalled. Residents report that the promised comprehensive bunker program remains largely unfulfilled, leaving the population as exposed to future shelling as it was during the May 2025 crisis. Previous bunker programs had been limited to villages near the LoC, but officials now plan to extend coverage to areas within the effective range of Pakistani artillery.

Q: How long did the Pakistani shelling last?

The shelling began in the early hours of May 7, 2025, within approximately thirty minutes of India’s Operation Sindoor strikes, and continued with varying intensity through the ceasefire announced at 5:00 PM IST on May 10. The most concentrated shelling occurred on the night of May 6 to May 7 and during the early morning hours of May 10. The shelling was not continuous throughout the four-day period but consisted of sustained barrages separated by periods of lower-intensity firing, with the intensity correlating to broader escalatory dynamics in the aerial and naval dimensions of the conflict. Reports of ceasefire violations continued even after the May 10 agreement, with sporadic shelling along border areas raising concerns about the truce’s durability.

Q: What was the extent of civilian displacement from Poonch?

Over two hundred thousand border residents from Poonch, Rajouri, Jammu, Samba, and Kathua districts fled their homes during the four-day conflict. Poonch town saw the most dramatic exodus, with over ninety percent of the population departing for Surankote, Rajouri, and Jammu. Displaced families sheltered with relatives, in school buildings converted to relief camps, or in makeshift accommodations. Several dozen students from Rajouri studying in Jammu found themselves stranded at bus stations because public transport refused to enter the shelling zones. The displacement disrupted livelihoods, separated families, and created a secondary humanitarian crisis as overwhelmed host communities absorbed the influx. Many residents did not return for days or weeks after the ceasefire, waiting for confirmation that the shelling had truly ended and that unexploded ordnance had been cleared from their villages.

Q: How did the 2003 ceasefire agreement collapse?

The 2003 ceasefire agreement between India and Pakistan, reaffirmed through back-channel diplomatic negotiations in February 2021, had produced a remarkable period of calm along the Line of Control. Border communities had used the quiet years to rebuild homes, resume agriculture, and send children to schools near the border. The agreement began collapsing in the weeks following the Pahalgam attack on April 22, 2025, when Pakistan initiated small-arms fire and occasional mortar rounds across the LoC in Kupwara, Baramulla, and Uri sectors. The pre-Sindoor ceasefire violations represented the thirteenth consecutive night of unprovoked firing when Operation Sindoor launched on May 7. The agreement’s collapse exposed border populations that had organized their lives around the assumption of continued peace, leaving them without the bunkers, evacuation plans, and psychological preparedness that characterized the pre-2003 era.

Q: What did Pakistan’s ISPR say about the shelling?

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations directorate, led by Director General Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, characterized the shelling as a legitimate response to Indian aggression under Operation Sindoor. ISPR statements emphasized that India had struck Pakistani territory first and that Pakistan’s armed forces were exercising their right to respond. The directorate did not explicitly acknowledge targeting civilian areas and instead framed the response as counter-battery fire against Indian military positions. During a May 9 Ministry of Foreign Affairs briefing, Pakistan also proposed a neutral third-party investigation into the Pahalgam attack, which India rejected. ISPR subsequently claimed Pakistani forces had successfully defended against Indian aggression and inflicted significant damage through Operation Bunyan-un-Marsoos, though many of these claims were disputed by Indian military assessments and independent observers.

Q: What compensation was offered to shelling victims?

Multiple levels of government offered compensation to families affected by the shelling. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced additional compensation of two lakh rupees for families whose homes were completely destroyed and one lakh rupees for partially damaged homes. Union Home Minister Amit Shah assured affected families during his Poonch visit that the central government would extend all possible assistance. The Jammu and Kashmir administration initiated damage assessment exercises, with the Chief Secretary personally visiting shelling-hit areas in Rajouri. Some residents whose homes were damaged received partial compensation relatively quickly, while others reported delays. Residents and local advocates have noted that no compensation can substitute for the loss of life, and that the government’s rehabilitation efforts, while welcomed, have not matched the scale of the devastation.

Q: Could India have prevented the civilian casualties from Pakistani retaliation?

Preventing civilian casualties from Pakistani retaliatory shelling would have required a combination of measures that were either absent or inadequate during the May 2025 crisis. Comprehensive bunker construction in all border towns within Pakistani artillery range would have provided physical protection. Earlier and more organized civilian evacuation could have reduced the population exposed to shelling. Enhanced counter-battery radar and suppression fire could have silenced Pakistani gun positions more quickly. Diplomatic back-channels establishing explicit red lines against civilian targeting might have constrained Pakistan’s target selection. India’s defense planners had anticipated the possibility of cross-border retaliation after Sindoor but apparently did not pre-position the civil defense measures necessary to protect the border population from the specific form that retaliation took. The gap between military offensive capability and civilian defensive infrastructure remains a critical vulnerability that the Poonch experience exposed with brutal clarity.

Q: What is the strategic significance of the Poonch shelling for future crises?

The Poonch shelling established a retaliatory template that will likely recur in future India-Pakistan military crises. Pakistan demonstrated that any Indian precision strike on Pakistani territory will trigger area-effect artillery bombardment of Indian border towns, creating civilian casualties that India’s democratic political system must absorb. This dynamic creates a structural asymmetry in escalation calculations: India must weigh the military value of precision strikes against the political cost of civilian deaths along the LoC, while Pakistan can impose those costs at relatively low military expense using conventional artillery. India’s long-term response, through bunker construction, counter-battery improvements, and potentially establishing international norms against civilian targeting, will determine whether the Poonch template constrains or simply complicates India’s surgical strike doctrine. Until the civilian protection gap is closed, the border population remains the strategic variable that neither side adequately protects.

Q: How did the Poonch shelling compare to historical cross-border artillery exchanges?

The May 2025 Poonch shelling was the most destructive cross-border artillery bombardment of a civilian population center along the India-Pakistan border in decades. While the LoC experienced sustained shelling during the Kargil conflict of 1999 and periodic ceasefire violations between 2003 and 2021, the concentration of fire on Poonch town itself, hitting the district headquarters rather than just forward villages, was unprecedented in recent memory. Deputy Commissioner Poonch acknowledged that this was the first time many towns like Rajouri and Poonch were hit by Pakistani shelling of this intensity, necessitating a fundamental rethinking of how urban centers within artillery range would be protected. The intensity, duration, and civilian toll of the May 2025 bombardment exceeded any single episode of cross-border firing since the 2003 ceasefire agreement.