By Panu Wongcha-um and Chayut Setboonsarng

BANGKOK/PHNOM PENH (Reuters) -Thailand’s military deployed an F-16 fighter jet against Cambodia’s armed forces on Thursday, the Thai army said, as weeks of tension over a border dispute escalated into clashes that have killed at least two civilians.

Of the six F-16 fighter jets that Thailand has readied to deploy along the disputed border, one of the aircraft fired into Cambodia and destroyed a military target, the Thai army said. Both countries accused each other of starting the clash early on Thursday. 

“We have used air power against military targets as planned,” Thai army deputy spokesperson Richa Suksuwanon told reporters.

Cambodia’s defence ministry did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation on the air strike. 

The skirmishes came after Thailand recalled its ambassador to Cambodia late on Wednesday and said it would expel Cambodia’s envoy in Bangkok, after a second Thai soldier in the space of a week lost a limb to a landmine that Bangkok alleged had been laid recently in the disputed area.

For more than a century, Thailand and Cambodia have contested sovereignty at various undemarcated points along their 817 km (508 miles) land border, which has led to skirmishes over several years and at least a dozen deaths, including during a weeklong exchange of artillery in 2011.

Tensions were reignited in May following the killing of a Cambodian soldier during a brief exchange of gunfire, which escalated into a full-blown diplomatic crisis and now has triggered armed clashes.

The clashes began early on Thursday near the disputed Ta Moan Thom temple along the eastern border between Cambodia and Thailand, around 360 km from the Thai capital Bangkok.

“Artillery shell fell on people’s homes,” Sutthirot Charoenthanasak, district chief of Kabcheing in Thailand’s Surin province, told Reuters, describing the firing by the Cambodian side.

“Two people have died,” he said, adding that district authorities had evacuated 40,000 civilians from 86 villages near the border to safer locations.

Cambodia’s influential former premier Hun Sen in a Facebook post said two Cambodian provinces had come under shelling from the Thai military. 

Thailand this week accused Cambodia of placing landmines in a disputed area that injured three soldiers. Phnom Penh denied the claim and said the soldiers had veered off agreed routes and triggered a mine left behind from decades of war.

Cambodia has many landmines left over from its civil war decades ago, numbering in the millions according to de-mining groups.

But Thailand maintains landmines have been placed at the border area recently, which Cambodia has described as baseless allegations.

(Reporting by Panu Wongcha-um and Chayut Setboonsarng; Writing by Devjyot Ghoshal; Editing by Martin Petty)