The Armenian Defense Ministry said the automatic gunfire damaged one of the houses in Nerkin Hand, a village in Armenia’s southeastern Syunik province located on the Azerbaijani border. It released photographs of bullet holes on the house roof.
“Nobody was injured,” read a short statement released by the ministry.
Local residents said they heard gunshots fired from nearby Azerbaijani army positions early in the morning. They said gunfire also erupted there on Thursday morning.
“We can’t leave homes and take cover, especially my family that has no basement or some other safe place,” one of them, Lusine Babayan, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
The Armenian military had not reported ceasefire violations in or around Nerkin Hand since February 2024. In the last three months, such violations have been a regular occurrence outside two other Syunik villages located some 200 kilometers north of Nerkin Hand.
Nerkin Hand is in turn located less than 40 kilometers north of Armenia’s border with Iran. There are growing fears in Armenia that that Azerbaijan may take advantage of Iran’s conflict with Israel to invade Syunik in a bid to open a land corridor to its Nakhichevan exclave.
Pashinian dismissed such warnings as “provocative” and “unfounded” on Wednesday. He argued that Baku and Yerevan essentially finalized a bilateral peace treaty earlier this year.
The Azerbaijani side makes the signing of the draft treaty conditional change of Armenia’s constitution. It also continues to demand the extraterritorial corridor through Syunik strongly opposed by Tehran.
The Azerbaijani demands are backed by Turkey and Erdogan in particular. The Turkish president was due to meet with Pashinian in Istanbul on Friday evening. He met with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in another Turkish city on Thursday.