Border clashes erupted again early on Thursday between arch-foes Azerbaijan and Armenia, officials in both countries said, following a pause in fighting amid a flare-up over a decades-long territorial dispute.

The territory was seized by ethnic Armenian separatists in a 1990s war that claimed 30,000 lives, though the recent fighting broke out on a northern section of their shared border far from Karabakh.

Azerbaijani forces were “shelling Armenian villages with mortars and howitzers,” Armenia’s defence ministry spokeswoman Sushan Stepanyan said on Thursday.