Trump also repeated his claim that seven fighter jets or more were shot down during the hostilities, saying, “I saw they were fighting, then I saw seven jets were shot down. I said, ‘That’s not good.’ That’s a lot of jets. You know, USD 150 million planes were shot down. A lot of them. Seven, maybe more than that. They didn’t even report the real number.”

The US President had earlier put the number at five and said he used trade pressure to halt the escalation.

“I have stopped all of these wars. A big one would have been India and Pakistan…” he said during a bilateral meeting with the President of the Republic of Korea on Monday (US local time).

He added, “The war with India and Pakistan was the next level that was going to be a nuclear war… They already shot down 7 jets – that was raging. I said, ‘You want to trade? We are not doing any trade or anything with you if you keep fighting, you’ve got 24 hours to settle it’. They said, ‘Well, there’s no more war going on.’ I used that on numerous occasions. I used trade and whatever I had to use…”

Trump has referred to the India-Pakistan conflict several times before.

In July, he made a similar claim, saying India and Pakistan were close to a nuclear conflict after the Pahalgam terror attack that left 26 people dead and that he intervened at a crucial time to de-escalate.

“We have stopped wars between India and Pakistan. They were probably going to end up in a nuclear war. They shot down five planes in the last attack. It was back and forth, back and forth. I called them and I said no more trade if you do this. They are both powerful nuclear nations. Who knows where that would have ended up, and I stopped it…” Trump said.

His remarks came a day after the White House credited his intervention with helping secure a “ceasefire” between India and Pakistan following Operation Sindoor, which targeted terror camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir on May 7.

India has consistently denied any third-party involvement in the de-escalation asserting that it was Pakistan’s Director General of Military Operations who reached out to his Indian counterpart on May 10, leading to a ceasefire agreed upon directly between the two sides.