Seven schoolchildren and a teacher have been rescued from a homemade cable car that was dangling for more than 14 hours over a ravine in Pakistan after the lines snapped.

The Pakistan army said it was a rescue operation of “unprecedented difficulty” involving a military helicopter and the use of a zipline.

It’s been reported that two of the cable lines snapped as the students were travelling to school around 7am local time.

The group became stranded in mid-air hundreds of metres over a ravine in Battagram, about 200km north of Islamabad.

They were trapped about 275 metres above ground as the cable car hung precariously at an angle all day.

The homemade cable car system is common in mountainous areas of Pakistan where infrastructure is lacking.

“It was a unique operation that required lots of skill,” the military said in a statement.

The high-risk rescue began with a helicopter operation which managed to extract two of the children during the day.

At nightfall, ziplines took over and were used to ferry the rest of the group to safety.

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“All the kids have been successfully and safely rescued,” caretaker Prime Minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar said in a post on messaging platform X.

“Great team work by the military, rescue departments, district administration as well as the local people.”

The military helicopter rescue operation was called off as night fell and flood lights were installed as a ground-based rescue continued.

A security source said that cable crossing experts had been trying to rescue the children one by one by transferring them on to a small platform along the cable.

Before the helicopter rescue was called off, TV footage showed one child being lifted off the cable car in a harness, swinging side to side, before being lowered to the ground.

The rescue effort transfixed the country, with Pakistanis crowded around television sets, as media showed footage of an emergency worker dangling from a helicopter cable close to the small cabin, with those onboard cramped together.

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“An extremely difficult and complicated operation has been successfully completed by the Pakistan military,” the military said in a statement.

“All stranded persons were safely evacuated and moved to a safe place… Civil administration and locals also actively came forward to participate in this operation.”

A video shared by a rescue agency official showed more than a dozen rescuers and locals lined up near the edge of the dark ravine, pulling on a cable until a boy attached to it by a harness reached the hillside safely to cries of “God is great”.

“It is a slow and risky operation. One person needs to tie himself with a rope and he will go in a small chairlift and rescue them one by one,” said Abdul Nasir Khan, a resident.

The helicopter rescue mission had been complicated by gusty winds in the area and the fact that the helicopters’ rotor blades risked further destabilising the lift, he said.

“Our situation is precarious, for God’s sake do something,” Gulfaraz, a 20-year-old on the cable car, told local television channel Geo News over the phone.

He said the children were aged between 10 and 15 and one had fainted due to the heat and fear.