Amid missiles, booming guns and chest-thumping rhetoric, India and Pakistan are moving closer to an all-out conflict.

    But Kashmiris on the front line say they’re paying the price.

    On Wednesday, three different regions in Indian-administered Kashmir were struck by Pakistani shelling.

    “We fear the worst,” said Ahmad, adding that his two daughters, aged nine and 11, are frightened.

    “They are asking why it happened? Would we be killed?” Ahmad told Al Jazeera, adding that the cross-border shelling started at 2am on     Wednesday, and left two minors – a 13-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy – wounded.

    Ghulam Muhammad Chopan, an 80-year-old resident, said that he felt too old to leave his home, but that there was no other option.

    “At this age, I had to leave my house. At night, the firing was so intense that by dawn, the village was empty. Everyone fled,” he said.

    “War should never be rejoiced. When the shells hit, they don’t ask your identity,” said Farooq Ahmad, a resident of Kamalkote village in Uri.

    “Those calling for the war do not know how it feels when a shell lands on your kids when they are asleep at night.”

    US Vice President JD Vance has said that Washington wants to see a “de-escalation” in the conflict between India and Pakistan, but that it is “fundamentally none of our business”.

    “What we can do is try to encourage these folks to de-escalate a little bit, but we’re not going to get involved in the middle of a war that’s fundamentally none of our business and has nothing to do with America’s ability to control it,” said Vance, an advocate of US disengagement from international conflicts, in an interview with Fox News.

    Rashul Singh Oberh, a resident in the city of Jammu in India, has told Al Jazeera that a blackout is being observed in the city, and they are hearing sirens again.

    “I’m approximately 3km [1.9 miles] away from the Jammu airport. At around midnight local time, the first electricity blackout had been lifted. But at 2am [20:30 GMT] we had a blackout again and heard sirens blaring for around five minutes,” he said.

    “But we saw nothing in the sky,” Oberh added.

    India said Pakistan launched attacks earlier today in Jammu and Kashmir. Pakistan has denied the claims.

    A state of high alert has been declared in India’s capital New Delhi and all government employees’ leaves were cancelled amid tensions with Pakistan, according to a Press Trust of India (PTI) report.

    Delhi’s airport also issued a travel advisory.

   While its operations remain normal, the airport has warned that some flights have been affected “due to changing airspace conditions and heightened security”.

    As conflict escalated between India and Pakistan for the second day, misinformation and rumours were rife on both sides of the Radcliffe Line, helped along by mainstream and social media, a journalist based in India who preferred not to be named told Al Jazeera.

    On Thursday, there were reports on Indian TV of each side moving tanks towards the other. These were refuted by the Indian government. There were also reports on Indian news channels of suicide attacks by armed men in India’s Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab states, which were also refuted by the Indian government.

    On the same day, a story played on Indian news media of Pakistan’s DG ISPR admitting in a video of the shutdown of Pakistan Air Force’s two JF-17 fighter aircraft. This story eventually seems to have died a natural death when users on X pointed out the video was an apparent AI-generated fake.