Four days of drone volleys and missile strikes between India and Pakistan, the most intense fighting between the nuclear-armed rivals in decades, ended on Saturday when both countries agreed to a cease-fire, according to Indian, Pakistani and U.S. officials.
President Trump announced the cease-fire on his social media site, and said it had been mediated by the United States. Indian and Pakistani officials confirmed the cease-fire, though only Pakistan quickly acknowledged an American role.
“Pakistan appreciates the United States for facilitating this outcome, which we have accepted in the interest of regional peace and stability,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of Pakistan said on social media.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement that he and Vice President JD Vance had engaged with senior officials from both Pakistan and India, including their prime ministers, over 48 hours. In addition to the cease-fire, India and Pakistan also agreed to “start talks on a broad set of issues at a neutral site,” Mr. Rubio said.
But the Indian government contradicted Mr. Rubio, saying the cease-fire had been worked out directly between India and Pakistan, and that there had been no decision to hold talks on any other issue at any location.
The crisis began when 26 civilians were killed in a terrorist attack last month on the Indian side of a disputed territory, Kashmir, and quickly escalated into accusations and then outright fighting. India accused Pakistan of harboring the terrorist groups responsible for the massacre, which Pakistan denied, and this week India struck sites in Pakistan — leading to a series of attacks that both sides described as retaliation.
Some of the most intense fighting took place along the Line of Control, which divides the contested Kashmir region between India and Pakistan. Dozens of civilians have died on both sides as Indian and Pakistani troops have exchanged fire.
And it was not clear, as night fell on Saturday, that the cease-fire had firmly taken hold in the disputed region, where residents reported hearing exchanges of fire.
Just hours before Mr. Trump announced the cease-fire, the conflict had escalated further, with Pakistan saying that India had hit three of its air bases with missiles — including a key air force installation near the capital. The Pakistani military then said in a statement that it had retaliated against several military sites in India with its own missiles, calling its response “an eye for an eye.”
Fearing the clashes could escalate into all-out war, several countries with close ties to both India and Pakistan, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, had been working for days to try to cool the conflict.
Mr. Rubio spoke with the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan on Saturday morning, urging both sides to find a way out of the crisis and “avoid miscalculation,” according to the State Department. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, described his call with Mr. Rubio as “very reassuring.”
Mr. Dar, who had represented Pakistan in talks with a number of countries trying to mediate a diplomatic solution to the crisis, said on social media on Saturday that his country had agreed to a cease-fire with India with immediate effect.
India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, said at a news conference in New Delhi that the directors general of the two countries’ militaries had spoken on Saturday and had agreed to stop all fire from land, air and sea. He said the directors general would speak again on Monday, suggesting that the arrangement could be temporary and up for reassessment.
A swirl of competing claims and disinformation has surrounded the conflict, making it difficult to verify the exact details of the fighting and its toll. The cease-fire announcement came after a night of some of the heaviest military engagement, including two nights of drone warfare that appeared to have inflicted damage on the two militaries.
Throughout the crisis, Indian and Pakistani officials and their allies have tried to shape perceptions of their successes and losses, contesting each other’s claims about strikes and losses.
In a news conference on Saturday, Indian military officials described striking several Pakistani military targets, two of them radar sites, in response to a wave of Pakistani attacks on 26 locations using drones, long-range weapons and fighter planes.
There was “limited damage” to equipment and personnel at four Indian air force bases, Vyomika Singh, an Indian Air Force officer, said at the news conference.
Residents in Kashmir have described intense shelling in recent days, giving a glimpse of the fighting on the ground. Iftkhar Ahmed, a politician from Rajouri, a town on the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir, said four people had died in his neighborhood after being hit by artillery fire that started on Friday night and continued into Saturday.
Mr. Ahmed, like many others in the area, is used to shelling, but earlier episodes did not last very long. “This time, it was very long and intense,” he said.
After the cease-fire was announced, many in the region breathed a sigh of relief, with relatives calling each other to share the news and some families getting ready to return to homes that had been threatened by shelling.
Seth Krummrich, a military analyst and former U.S. Army colonel, said this fighting had been the “most violent and concerning escalation” he could recall in the longstanding conflict between the two nations.
But Mr. Krummrich, now a senior executive at the private security firm Global Guardian, also said that the focus mostly on military targets and “parity in the types, levels and locations of attacks reflects that both sides are deliberately calibrating their responses,” making him cautiously optimistic. Neither side, he said, was “going for a strategic escalatory ‘kill shot.’”
And although the military clashes escalated, leaders in both countries maintained that they did not want the conflict to worsen. India and Pakistan have fought repeated wars since the two countries were split in 1947, with Kashmir’s status among the contested issues. One of those wars, in December 1971, established the Line of Control that divides Kashmir. But India and Pakistan are separated by an international border of around 2,000 miles, and in this conflict each was targeting sites far beyond Kashmir.
The current conflict played out in an environment of intense nationalism in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pursued an aggressive stance on Pakistan, trying to isolate it.
His support base seemed satisfied with the military action that ended on Saturday. “We had voted for a strongman, and he has proved himself,” said Manoj Misra, a Modi supporter in the city of Lucknow.
Both India and Pakistan had reasons to de-escalate, with Pakistan seeking the extension of a vital loan worth billions of dollars from the International Monetary Fund, and with India trying to negotiate a trade deal with the Trump administration.
In a sign of easing tensions, Pakistan on Saturday afternoon reopened its airspace for all flights, after having closed it as the conflict intensified.
But it was not clear whether relations would soon recover to where they had been before the crisis began. In the wake of the terrorist attack last month, Pakistan and India downgraded diplomatic relations and restricted visas to each other’s citizens, and India had also pulled out of a water-sharing treaty between the two countries that is vital for Pakistan’s agriculture.
Hari Kumar, Suhasini Raj, Pragati K.B. and Alex Travelli contributed reporting.
