Thailand Scrambles F-16 Jets to Bomb Cambodia as Border Clashes Kill at Least 13

Thailand deployed F-16 fighter jets to bomb Cambodian military positions on Thursday after a long-simmering border dispute exploded into the deadliest fighting between the two neighbors in years, killing at least 13 civilians on the Thai side and driving tens of thousands of villagers from their homes.

The violence began before dawn near the Prasat Ta Muen Thom temple complex, a Khmer-era ruin that sits astride the contested frontier between Thailand's Surin province and Cambodia's Oddar Meanchey. Thai officials said Cambodian troops opened fire on soldiers and outposts, then loosed BM-21 Grad rockets at other points along the border. Cambodia insisted that Thai forces had fired first and accused its neighbor of striking both military and civilian targets, including homes and a hospital.

In retaliation, the Royal Thai Air Force sent F-16s across the border in two waves of strikes, hitting Cambodian positions in the strategic areas around Ta Muen Thom, the Preah Vihear temple and Phu Makua. It was a sharp escalation from previous rounds of border friction: for the first time, both militaries brought heavy weaponry — reconnaissance drones, rocket artillery and fighter aircraft — into what had long been a standoff fought mostly with rifles and rhetoric.

Thailand confirmed at least 13 civilian deaths from the Cambodian barrages and said dozens more had been wounded. Cambodia did not immediately release casualty figures. Terrified residents on both sides packed into cars or fled on foot, and Thai authorities began evacuating villages within range of the shelling as the crackle of artillery echoed across the rice paddies.

The dispute traces back more than a century to a colonial-era map that left the ownership of several hilltop temples ambiguous, a grievance that has periodically flared into deadly skirmishes. The 11th-century Preah Vihear temple, awarded to Cambodia by the International Court of Justice in 1962 and again in 2013, remains the emotional core of the quarrel. Nationalist sentiment runs hot in both capitals, and neither government can easily be seen to back down.

The economic stakes are considerable. Thailand and Cambodia are deeply intertwined through cross-border trade, tourism and migrant labor, and prolonged fighting threatens to sever supply lines and strand hundreds of thousands of Cambodian workers employed on the Thai side. Border markets that normally hum with commerce fell silent as shops shuttered and roads emptied.

Regional powers and the United Nations urged immediate restraint as the clashes threatened to draw in the wider Association of Southeast Asian Nations, whose members have prized the bloc's tradition of non-interference. Diplomats warned that without a rapid cease-fire, the confrontation risked spiraling into the first sustained interstate war Southeast Asia has seen in decades — a prospect that only days earlier had seemed unthinkable.