If the night of 7 May 2025 was the moment Pakistan’s narrative-makers seized on, the seventy-two hours that followed were the period during which their counter-strike campaign came apart at every operational level. According to the Centre d’Histoire et de Prospective Militaires note of Operation Sindoor, three successive waves of Pakistani drone, cruise-missile, rocket, and ballistic-missile attacks across 7, 8, and 9 May failed to penetrate India’s integrated air-defence bubble, failed to map the Indian electronic order of battle, and failed to produce a single piece of satellite-verifiable damage to a major Indian asset. By the time Pakistani military authorities lifted the phone to request a ceasefire on the morning of 10 May, the air war was being lost not in Pakistani airspace but over Indian territory, where the Pakistan Air Force’s most ambitious offensive operation in decades had been comprehensively absorbed.
The first Pakistani wave, launched on the night of 7 to 8 May, involved between 300 and 400 drones, with the CHPM placing the figure at “over 300 drones” alongside JF-17 sorties firing CM-400AKG missiles. The second wave, on the night of 8 to 9 May, comprised roughly 600 drones supported by Fatah-I and Fatah-II long-range artillery rockets and Hatf-II short-range ballistic missiles. The third wave, from 9 May evening into the early hours of 10 May, was described as “even larger than the previous ones” and focused exclusively on Indian airbases and the S-400 batteries deployed near them. The Pakistani arsenal drew on Turkish-supplied Asisguard Songar drones, Yiha-III suicide drones, Chinese CH-4s and Pakistani Bayraktar TB2 and Akinci platforms operating at higher altitude for guided-munition release. The intent was the same saturation logic the Shahed campaigns had pioneered against Ukraine, namely, to overwhelm a numerically thin air-defence network with cheap volume.
It did not work as the CHPM note records that Indian anti-aircraft guns alone destroyed more than half the Pakistani drones over the four days of the conflict, with jamming and spoofing systems doing much of the remaining work. The Bharat Electronics-DRDO Akashteer system, formally inducted into the Indian Army only in 2024, operated in tandem with the Indian Air Force’s Integrated Air Command, Control and Communication System and the Navy’s Trigun, fusing optical, electromagnetic, radar, and civilian-observer inputs into a single recognized air picture. Indian missile-battery radars were activated only for very brief windows and only when targets were already inside their firing envelopes. The Pakistani assumption underlying the saturation campaign, namely that drones would force Indian radars into sustained emission and thereby reveal SAM positions to electronic intelligence, was thus structurally defeated. However, the Pakistanis failed to accurately map the Indian electronic order of battle following this initial strike.
The third wave on 9 to 10 May produced Pakistan’s most extravagant fake claim, namely that a JF-17 had used decoys and electronic jamming to penetrate the engagement envelope of the S-400 battery at Adampur. The Pakistan Air Force narrative, propagated through Inter-Services Public Relations on the morning of 10 May, claimed thirty-four Indian targets struck across multiple airbases and the grounding of the IAF combat fleet. However, multiple reports confirmed that the two CM-400AKG missiles caused no significant damage to the Adampur battery and that the S-400 systems maintained Pakistani fighters at standoff range throughout. The IAF’s own assessment is that S-400 batteries shot down five PAF F-16 and JF-17 fighters between 7 and 10 May, while no Pakistani aircraft entered the engagement envelope of India’s medium-range surface-to-air missile systems.
The disparity between Pakistani claims and verifiable evidence is the most damaging single feature of the Bunyan-um-Marsoos campaign. The CHPM report is blunt that “in contrast to the Indians, the Pakistanis couldn’t support their claims with satellite imagery or open-source material.” When the Indian Director General of Military Operations, Lieutenant General Rajiv Ghai, briefed the media, the Indian side produced satellite imagery of the Chunian and Pasrur radar sites destroyed by IAF Harop and Harpy loitering munitions during the suppression-of-enemy-air-defence campaign of 8 to 9 May, of the cratered Sargodha runway intersection, of the Bholari Erieye hangar and of the Jacobabad F-16 maintenance hangar. Pakistan produced no equivalent visual record for any of its claimed strikes on Indian airbases and the Akashteer system “intercepted and neutralised every inbound projectile” during the night of 9 to 10 May.
The CHPM report’s concluding observation, that air warfare is no longer “a contest between air forces” but “a contest between integrated joint systems comprising a wide variety of sensors and offensive and defensive effectors,” is precisely demonstrated by Bunyan-um-Marsoos in the negative. Pakistan possessed Chinese HQ-9 and HQ-16 batteries, Saab Erieye airborne early warning, Turkish drones, the Link-17 data link and a serviceable combat air fleet, but it lacked the integrated joint command-and-control architecture to convert these into a sustained operational tempo. India, by contrast, fielded an indigenously networked architecture in which the Akash regiment that had been redeployed cross-country from the eastern sector in the days before Operation Sindoor was, within minutes of arriving at its forward positions, plugged into the same recognised air picture as an S-400 battery near Adampur and an anti-drone laser near Srinagar. It is also why the standard Pakistani retort that Indian air defence had been “saturated” by drone volume collapses on contact with the evidence.
By the morning of 10 May, when the IAF launched its retaliatory cruise-missile blitz against Nur Khan, Murid, Sargodha, Jacobabad, Bholari, Sukkur, Rafiqui, and Rahim Yar Khan. It was operating from an air-defence position that had absorbed three Pakistani strike waves without losing a single S-400 battery, a single major airbase, or a single combat squadron’s operational readiness. That is the strategic context in which Pakistani military authorities requested a ceasefire by noon the same day. The seventy-two hours after 7 May gave India something altogether more consequential, namely an operational demonstration that the country’s air-defence architecture had matured to the point where a saturation campaign by Pakistan could be defeated decisively, and on the strength of indigenous systems whose integration was the genuine revelation of the 4-day conflict.
Jaish e Mohammed’s return shows the impunity of terrorism
The rebuilding of Jaish-e-Mohammed’s Bahawalpur headquarters is not just a South Asian security story. It is a warning about how jihadist infrastructure survives when states learn to manage international outrage rather than dismantle the machinery of terror.
According to recent satellite imagery reported by India Today, reconstruction is under way at the Jamia Subhan Allah compound in Bahawalpur, the long-associated headquarters of Masood Azhar’s Jaish-e-Mohammed. Heavy machinery, repair work and restored domes are reportedly visible at a site India struck during Operation Sindoor in May 2025. In other words, a UN-designated terrorist organisation’s symbolic and operational nerve centre appears not to have disappeared. It has been damaged, mourned, fundraised for and rebuilt.
That sequence should sound grimly familiar to Israelis. Terror organisations do not live only in tunnels, camps or compounds. They live in the political spaces that tolerate them, in the religious language that sanctifies them, in the financial networks that revive them and in the state structures that deny responsibility while allowing them to function. Bahawalpur is not Gaza, and Jaish-e-Mohammed is not Hamas. But the logic of regeneration is not unfamiliar. A headquarters is struck. The dead are turned into martyrs. The organisation’s losses become propaganda. The next generation is told that rebuilding is resistance.
This is why the declarations made by Jaish’s own leaders matter. After Operation Sindoor, a statement attributed to Masood Azhar acknowledged that ten members of his family and four close aides had been killed in the Indian strike on Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur. Among the dead, according to the statement, were his elder sister, her husband, a nephew and his wife, a niece, and five children from the extended family. Azhar did not frame the strike as the exposure of a terror hub. He framed it as martyrdom.
That admission is more revealing than any official denial from Islamabad. If the family and aides of one of the world’s most notorious jihadist leaders were present inside the compound, then the site was not merely a religious or educational institution caught in the fog of escalation. It was part of the command geography of terror.
Later, Jaish commander Masood Ilyas Kashmiri reportedly went further. Speaking at the Mission Mustafa conference, he allegedly claimed that Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, had sent senior officers to attend the funerals of those killed in Operation Sindoor. Other reports said Kashmiri described Masood Azhar’s family as having been torn apart by the Indian strike. Terror groups often exaggerate their victories and conceal their wounds. Here, Jaish’s own rhetoric confirmed the scale of the damage.
But the latest satellite imagery suggests something equally important. The damage did not produce dismantlement. It produced reconstruction. This is the old Pakistani bargain with jihadist organisations, dressed in new language. Groups are banned but reappear. Leaders are restricted but remain reachable. Camps are denied but remain visible. Networks are disrupted but not destroyed. The state performs distance while the infrastructure survives.
For Israel, this pattern is not abstract. The post-October 7 debate has often been framed around Gaza, tunnels, hostages, humanitarian corridors and ceasefire diplomacy. But beneath that is a larger strategic question. What happens when a terrorist organisation is allowed to convert military defeat into political survival? What happens when buildings are destroyed but the ecosystem that produced them is left intact? What happens when international actors mistake a pause for a solution?
India faces the same question in its own theatre. Operation Sindoor demonstrated that New Delhi could reach deep into Pakistan and strike the heart of Jaish-e-Mohammed’s infrastructure. It also demonstrated the limits of kinetic action. A missile can destroy a compound. It cannot, by itself, dismantle the ideology, financing, recruitment and state protection that allow the compound to rise again.
That is why Bahawalpur should concern Washington, Jerusalem and Europe as much as New Delhi. Jaish-e-Mohammed is not a local militia with local ambitions. It belongs to the same global grammar of jihadism that turns grievance into recruitment, death into sanctity and state weakness into strategic depth. The names and theatres differ, but the operating logic is recognisable.
The fundraising trail makes the matter even worse. Reports after Operation Sindoor indicated that Jaish had begun seeking donations to rebuild the Bahawalpur complex, framing the effort in religious terms. This is not the behaviour of a defeated organisation. It is the behaviour of a network that expects time, money and political cover to do what terror networks do best: absorb punishment, mythologise loss and regenerate.
The scandal, therefore, is not only that Bahawalpur was struck. It is that Bahawalpur appears to be returning.
Pakistan has long presented itself as both victim and partner in the war on terror. Yet the physical reconstruction of a known Jaish centre after a major Indian strike raises the unavoidable question: what does Pakistani counter-terror compliance actually mean if a UN-designated group can rebuild its headquarters in plain sight?
For Israelis, the answer is painfully familiar. Terror infrastructure is never just infrastructure. It is an ecosystem. It survives when the world treats the visible target as the whole problem and ignores the deeper architecture beneath it.
The repaired domes of Jamia Subhan Allah are therefore more than a Pakistani embarrassment. They are a warning. If terror networks are allowed to rebuild, they will not interpret survival as restraint. They will interpret it as vindication.
Bahawalpur was hit. Bahawalpur was mourned. Bahawalpur was fundraised for. Now Bahawalpur is being rebuilt.
That is not recovery. It is impunity with scaffolding.