More than 1,000 religious schools have been closed and people have begun preparing bunkers for the walls.
Pakistan-managed Kashmir authorities have closed more than 1,000 religious schools, fearing that military retaliation could be carried out from India amid deadly attacks in disputed areas last week as tensions surge between nuclear-weapon neighbors.
India accused Pakistan of shootings, killing 26 people on April 22 in Pahalgam, India-managed Kashmir, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi offers his military “complete freedom of combat” to deal with it.
Pakistan denies any participation in the attack, with “reliable evidence” that India is now planning an upcoming military strike and guarantees that “any act of aggression will be responded to decisively”.
Pakistan's Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said in a television statement earlier on Wednesday that the attack could be in the "next 24 to 36 hours".
After fears that military escalation, authorities have closed more than 1,000 religious schools in Pakistan-managed Kashmir.
"We have announced a 10-day break for all Madrassas in Kashmir," Hafiz Nazeer Ahmed, head of the local religious affairs department, told AFP News.
A department source said this was “due to tensions on the border and the potential for conflict.”
About 1.5 million people live near the Line of Control (LOC) in Pakistan-managed Kashmir, where residents are also prepared for simple, muddy underground bunkers - reinforced with concrete if they can afford it.
"We've been constantly terrifying, especially about the safety of children," Iftikhar Ahmad Mir, 44, in Chakothi near LOC, told AFP.
“We make sure they don’t roam around after they finish school and go straight home.”
Emergency service workers in Muzaffarabad, a major city in Pakistan-run Kashmir, have also begun training school children on what to do if India attacks.
“We learned how to dress up a wounded person, how to bring someone to a stretcher and how to put them out,” said Ali Raza, 11.
The state-run Doordarshan Broadcasting Corporation reportedly chaired a cabinet security conference committee on Wednesday, the second meeting since the Pahalgam attack.
Meanwhile, as neighbors continue to exchange gunfire along the divisions of Kashmir, which is managed by India and Pakistan, other world leaders have stepped up diplomacy to ease spiral tensions.
India also shut down Pakistani aircraft on Wednesday after Pakistan banned excessive flights.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif urged the United States to urge India to “alloy speech and act responsibly.”
A State Department spokesman said in a statement Wednesday that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has asked two countries to "degrade tensions."
White House spokesman Tammy Bruce said Rubio “urged Pakistani officials to cooperate in investigating the unreasonable attack”.
Also on Tuesday, a spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he had spoken with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and helped in “withdrawal.”
While it is unclear what action India can do, a range of military tactics have been used in the past, such as covert military operations, propaganda surgical strikes, air strikes, attempts to take over Pakistan-controlled land, naval missions and full blows of conflict.
India and Pakistan have fought on the Himalayan territory of Kashmir since the end of violence in 1947.
Insurgents in Kashmir's Indian-run area have been seeking independence or merger with Pakistan since 1989.
The worst attack on Kashmir, operating in India in recent years, was in Pulwama in 2019, when a suicide bomber smashed a car with explosives into a security force convoy, killing 40 people and injuring 35 people.
Twelve days later, Indian fighter jets carried out air strikes on Pakistani territory.