The attackers wore camouflage and entered the valley through the dense forest that borders the tourist area. Survivors described a methodical process: the gunmen mingled with the crowd, then herded groups of visitors toward armed accomplices positioned deeper in the meadow. Men were singled out and asked their names and religion. Those identified as Hindu were shot. A Christian tourist was also killed. The firing lasted between 25 and 30 minutes, according to eyewitness accounts. One survivor told investigators that the attackers cursed the Indian prime minister and demanded that her father recite an Islamic verse before they shot him. The attack was the deadliest on Indian civilians since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which 166 civilians and security personnel were killed over four days.

The Resistance Front, a group believed to be a proxy of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, claimed responsibility twice -- once on the day of the attack and again the following day. TRF issued a statement framing the massacre as opposition to non-local settlement in Kashmir following the 2019 revocation of the region's special status, which had enabled people from elsewhere in India to purchase property and settle in Jammu and Kashmir for the first time. Days later, as international pressure mounted, TRF reversed course and denied involvement. The group had been designated a terrorist organization by both India and the United States, and was formed from the cadres of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen operating in Kashmir.

India's response escalated rapidly. The government accused Pakistan of supporting cross-border terrorism, suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, expelled Pakistani diplomats, and closed the border. Pakistan rejected the accusations, retaliated by suspending the Simla Agreement, restricted trade, and closed its airspace. The standoff crossed into open conflict on 7 May 2025 when India launched airstrikes targeting alleged terrorist camps inside Pakistan. A ceasefire was announced on 10 May. Within weeks, the attack in a tourist meadow had brought two nuclear-armed nations to the brink of full-scale war -- a trajectory that recalled, on a compressed timeline, the escalation that followed the 2019 Pulwama attack and the 2016 Uri attack before it.

Indian security forces launched Operation Mahadev to track down the perpetrators in the dense forests around Pahalgam. The hunt lasted months, complicated by the rugged terrain and the attackers' familiarity with the mountains. On 28 July 2025, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah informed Parliament that three terrorists linked to the Pahalgam attack had been killed. Investigators matched weapons recovered from the encounter to those used in the April massacre. Intelligence agencies traced the perpetrators in part through their reliance on electronic communication. The exact total number of attackers was never definitively established -- initial estimates ranged from two to seven.

The Pahalgam attack sits within a longer pattern of violence targeting civilians in Kashmir, from the massacres of Amarnath pilgrims in 2000, 2001, and 2002 to the bus ambush near Reasi in 2024. But the scale of the 2025 attack and the speed of its geopolitical consequences set it apart. Tourism in Kashmir, which the Indian government had promoted as evidence of normalcy after the 2019 constitutional changes, collapsed overnight. The meadow at Baisaran, where families had come to ride ponies and take photographs, became a symbol of how quickly the fragile calm in Kashmir can shatter. Among the twenty-six dead was a man whose only act of resistance was to grab for a gun -- a pony ride operator whose livelihood depended on the very tourists the attackers had come to kill.