NEW YORK (AP) — In what appears to be a sophisticated, remote attack, pagers used by hundreds of members of Hezbollah exploded almost simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria Tuesday, killing at least nine people — including an 8-year-old girl — and wounding thousands more.

A U.S. official said Israel briefed the U.S. on the operation — in which small amounts of explosive secreted in the pagers were detonated — on Tuesday after it was concluded. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the information publicly.

The Iran-backed militant group blamed Israel for the deadly explosions, which targeted an extraordinary breadth of people and showed signs of being a long-planned operation. Details on how the attack was executed are largely uncertain and investigators have not immediately said how the pagers were detonated. The Israeli military has declined to comment.

Here’s what we know so far.

Why were pagers used in the attack?

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah previously warned the group’s members not to carry cellphones, saying they could be used by Israel to track the group’s movements. As a result, the organization uses pagers to communicate.

A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the exploded devices were from a new brand the group had not used before. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press, did not identify the brand name or supplier.

Taiwanese company Gold Apollo said Wednesday it had authorized its brand on the AR-924 pager model and a company called BAC produced and sold the pagers. Further information on BAC wasn’t immediately available.

Nicholas Reese, adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies, explains smart phones carry a higher risk for intercepted communications in contrast to the simpler technology of pagers.

This type of attack will also force Hezbollah to change their communication strategies, said Reese, who previously worked as an intelligence officer, adding that survivors of Tuesday’s explosions are likely to throw away “not just their pagers, but their phones, and leaving their tablets or any other electronic devices.”

How could sabotage cause these pagers to explode?

Even with a U.S. official confirming it was a planned operation by Israel, multiple theories have emerged Tuesday around how the attack might have been carried out. Several experts who spoke with The Associated Press explained how the explosions were most likely the result of supply-chain interference.

Very small explosive devices may have been built into the pagers prior to their delivery to Hezbollah, and then all remotely triggered simultaneously, possibly with a radio signal.

By the time of the attack, “the battery was probably half-explosive and half-actual battery,” said Carlos Perez, director of security intelligence at TrustedSec.

A former British Army bomb disposal officer explained that an explosive device has five main components: A container, a battery, a triggering device, a detonator and an explosive charge.

“A pager has three of those already,” explained the ex-officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he now works as a consultant with clients on the Middle East. “You would only need to add the detonator and the charge.”

After security camera footage appeared on social media Tuesday purporting to show one of the pagers explode on a man’s hip in a Lebanese market, two munitions experts offered opinions that corroborate the U.S. official’s statement that the blast appeared to be the result of a tiny explosive device.

“Looking at the video, the size of the detonation is similar to that caused by an electric detonator alone or one that incorporates an extremely small, high-explosive charge,” said Sean Moorhouse, a former British Army officer and explosive ordinance disposal expert.

This signals involvement of a state actor, Moorhouse said. He adds that Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, is the most obvious suspect to have the resources to carry out such an attack.

N.R. Jenzen-Jones, an expert in military arms who is director of the Australian-based Armament Research Services, notes that Israel had been accused of carrying out similar operations in the past. Last year, AP reported that Iran accused Israel of trying to sabotage its ballistic missile program through faulty foreign parts that could explode, damaging or destroying the weapons before they could be used.

How long was this operation?

It would take a long time to plan an attack of this scale. The exact specifics are still unknown, but experts who spoke with the AP shared estimates ranging anywhere between several months to two years.

The sophistication of the attack suggests that the culprit has been collecting intelligence for a long time, Reese explained. An attack of this caliber requires building the relationships needed to gain physical access to the pagers before they were sold; developing the technology that would be embedded in the devices; and developing sources who can confirm that the targets were carrying the pagers.

And it’s likely the compromised pagers seemed normal to their users for some time before the attack. Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based veteran and a senior political risk analyst with over 37 years experience in the region, said he has had conversations with members of Hezbollah and survivors of Tuesday’s pager attack. He said the pagers were procured more than six months ago.

“The pagers functioned perfectly for six months,” Magnier said. What triggered the explosion, he said, appeared to be an error message sent to all the devices.

Based on his conversations with Hezbollah members, Magnier also said that many pagers didn’t go off, allowing the group to inspect them. They came to the conclusion that between 3 to 5 grams of a highly explosive material were concealed or embedded in the circuitry, he said.

Jenzen-Jones also adds that “such a large-scale operation also raises questions of targeting” — stressing the number of causalities and enormous impact reported so far.

“How can the party initiating the explosive be sure that a target’s child, for example, is not playing with the pager at the time it functions?” he said.

Hezbollah issued a statement confirming at least two members were killed in the bombings. One of them was the son of a Hezbollah member in parliament, according to the Hezbollah official who spoke anonymously. The group later issued announcements that six other members were killed Tuesday, though it did not specify how.

“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also targeted civilians,” Hezbollah said, adding that Israel will “for sure get its just punishment.”

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Associated Press journalist Johnson Lai in Taipei

Today in history:

On Sept. 17, 2011, a demonstration calling itself Occupy Wall Street began in New York, prompting similar protests around the U.S. and the world.

Also on this date:

In 1787, the Constitution of the United States was completed and signed by a majority of delegates attending the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

In 1908, Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge of the U.S. Army Signal Corps became the first person to die in the crash of a powered aircraft, the Wright Flyer, at Fort Myer, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.

In 1944, during World War II, Allied paratroopers launched Operation Market Garden, landing behind German lines in the Netherlands.

In 1978, after 12 days of meetings at the U.S. presidential retreat of Camp David, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (men-AH’-kem BAY’-gihn) signed the Camp David Accords, a framework for a peace treaty.

In 1980, former Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza was assassinated in Paraguay.

In 2001, six days after 9/11, stock prices nosedived but stopped short of collapse in an emotional, flag-waving reopening of Wall Street.

In 2021, a Los Angeles jury convicted New York real estate heir Robert Durst of killing his best friend 20 years earlier. (Durst, who was sentenced to life in prison, died in 2022.)

Today’s Birthdays:

• Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is 91.
• Retired Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter (SOO’-tur) is 85.
• Mountaineer-explorer Reinhold Messner is 80.
• Basketball Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson is 79.
• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is 74.
• Actor Cassandra Peterson (“Elvira, Mistress of the Dark”) is 73.
• Director-actor Paul Feig is 62.
• Film director Baz Luhrmann is 62.
• Singer BeBe Winans is 62.
• Actor Kyle Chandler is 59.
• Rapper Doug E. Fresh is 58.
• Author Cheryl Strayed is 56.
• Actor Matthew Settle is 55.
• Designer-TV personality Nate Berkus is 53.
• NASCAR driver Jimmie Johnson is 49.
• NHL forward Alexander Ovechkin (oh-VECH’-kin) is 39.
• Actor Danielle Brooks is 35.
• NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes is 29.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken heads to Egypt on Tuesday for his 10th trip to the Middle East since the war in Gaza began nearly a year ago, this one aimed partly at refining a proposal to present to Israel and Hamas for a cease-fire deal and release of hostages.

Unlike in recent mediating missions, America’s top diplomat this time is traveling without optimistic projections from the Biden administration of an expected breakthrough in the troubled negotiations.

Notably, Blinken has no public plans to go to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on this trip. The Israeli leader’s fiery public statements — like his declaration that Israel would accept only “total victory” when Blinken was last in the region in June — and some other unbudgeable demands have complicated earlier diplomacy.

Blinken is going to Egypt for talks Wednesday with Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and others, in a trip billed as focused both on American-Egyptian relations and Gaza consultations with Egypt.

The tamped-down U.S. approach to Mideast diplomacy follows months in which President Joe Biden and his officials publicly talked up an agreement to end the war in Gaza as being just within reach, hoping to build pressure on Netanyahu’s far-right government and Hamas to seal a deal.

The Biden administration now says it is working with fellow mediators Egypt and Qatar to come up with a revised final proposal to try to at least get Israel and Hamas into a six-week cease-fire that would free some of the hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. Americans believe public attention on details of the talks now would only hurt that effort.

Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada, and European Union.

American, Qatari and Egyptian officials still are consulting “about what that proposal will contain, and …. we’re trying to see that it’s a proposal that can get the parties to an ultimate agreement,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday.

The State Department pointed to Egypt’s important role in Gaza peace efforts in announcing last week that the Biden administration planned to give the country its full $1.3 billion in military aid, overriding congressional requirements that the U.S. hold back some of the funding if Egypt fails to show adequate progress on human rights. Blinken told Congress that Egypt has made progress on human rights, including in freeing political prisoners.

Blinken’s trip comes amid the risk of a full-on new front in the Middle East, with Israel threatening increasing military action against the Hezbollah militant organization in Lebanon. Biden envoy Amos Hochstein was in Israel on Monday to try to calm tensions after a stop in Lebanon.

Hezbollah has one of the strongest militaries in the Middle East, and like Hamas and smaller groups in Syria and Iraq, it is allied with Iran.

Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged strikes across Israel’s northern border with Lebanon since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas started the war in Gaza. Hezbollah says it will ease those strikes — which have uprooted tens of thousands of civilians on both sides of the border — only when there’s a cease-fire in Gaza.

Hochstein told Netanyahu and other Israeli officials that intensifying the conflict with Hezbollah would not help get Israelis back in their homes, according to a U.S. official. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks, said Hochstein stressed to Netanyahu that he risked sparking a broad and protracted regional conflict if he moved forward with a full-scale war in Lebanon.

Hochstein also underscored to Israeli officials that the Biden administration remained committed to finding a diplomatic solution to the tensions on Israel’s northern border in conjunction with a Gaza deal or on its own, the official said.

Netanyahu told Hochstein that it would “not be possible to return our residents without a fundamental change in the security situation in the north.” The prime minister said Israel “appreciates and respects” U.S. support but “will do what is necessary to maintain its security and return the residents of the north to their homes safely.”

Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, meanwhile, warned in his meeting with Hochstein that “the only way left to ensure the return of Israel’s northern communities to their homes will be via military action,” his office said.

In Gaza, the U.S. says Israel and Hamas have agreed to a deal in principle and that the biggest obstacles now include a disagreement on details of the hostage and prisoner swap and control over a buffer zone on the border between Gaza and Egypt. Netanyahu has demanded in recent weeks that the Israeli military be allowed to keep a presence in the Philadelphi corridor. Egypt and Hamas have rejected that demand.

The Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 killed about 1,200 people. Terrorists also abducted 250 people and are still holding around 100 hostages. About a third of the remaining hostages are believed to be dead.

Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, said Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its count. The war has caused widespread destruction, displaced a majority of Gaza’s people and created a humanitarian crisis.

Netanyahu says he is working to bring home the hostages. His critics accuse him of slow-rolling a deal because it could bring down his hardline coalition government, which includes members opposed to a truce with the Palestinians.

Asked earlier this month if Netanyahu was doing enough for a cease-fire deal, Biden said, simply, “no.” But he added that he still believed a deal was close.

___

Associated Press writer Aamer Madhani contributed to this report.

Today in history:

On Sept. 16, 2013, Aaron Alexis, a former U.S. Navy reservist, went on a shooting rampage inside the Washington Navy Yard, killing 12 people before being fatally shot police.

Also on this date:

In 1810, Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla called on his parishioners to join him in a rebellion against Spanish rule, marking the beginning of the Mexican War of Independence.

In 1908, General Motors was founded in Flint, Michigan, by William C. Durant.

In 1940, Samuel T. Rayburn of Texas was first elected speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives; he would hold the post for a record 17 years, spanning three separate terms.

In 1966, the Metropolitan Opera officially opened its new opera house at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts with the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra.”

In 1974, President Gerald R. Ford signed a proclamation announcing a conditional amnesty program for Vietnam war deserters and draft evaders.

In 1982, the massacre of more than 1,300 Palestinian men, women and children at the hands of Israeli-allied Christian Phalange militiamen began in west Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

In 2007, O.J. Simpson was arrested in the alleged armed robbery of sports memorabilia collectors in Las Vegas. (Simpson was later convicted of kidnapping and armed robbery and sentenced to nine to 33 years in prison; he was released in 2017.)

In 2018, at least 17 people were confirmed dead from Hurricane Florence as catastrophic flooding spread across the Carolinas.

Today’s Birthdays:

• Actor George Chakiris is 92.
• Actor Ed Begley Jr. is 75.
• Author-historian-filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr. is 74.
• Country singer David Bellamy (The Bellamy Brothers) is 74.
• Actor Mickey Rourke is 72.
• Jazz musician Earl Klugh is 71.
• TV personality Mark McEwen is 70.
• Baseball Hall of Famer Robin Yount is 69.
• Magician David Copperfield is 68.
• Actor Jennifer Tilly is 66.
• Retired MLB All-Star pitcher Orel Hershiser is 66.
• Baseball Hall of Famer Tim Raines is 65.
• Singer Richard Marx is 61.
• Comedian Molly Shannon is 60.
• Singer Marc Anthony is 56.
• News anchor/talk show host Tamron Hall is 54.
• Comedian-actor Amy Poehler is 53.
• Singer-songwriter Musiq Soulchild is 47.
• Rapper Flo Rida is 45.
• Actor Alexis Bledel is 43.
• Actor Madeline Zima is 39.
• Actor Max Minghella is 39.
• Rock singer-musician Nick Jonas (The Jonas Brothers) is 32.
• Actor Chase Stokes is 32.
• Golfer Bryson Dechambeau is 31.

Today in history:

On Sept. 15, 1963, four Black girls were killed when a bomb went off during Sunday services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. (Three Ku Klux Klansmen were eventually convicted for their roles in the blast.)

Also on this date:

In 1835, Charles Darwin reached the Galápagos Islands aboard the HMS Beagle.

In 1940, the tide turned in the Battle of Britain in World War II, as the Royal Air Force inflicted heavy losses upon the Luftwaffe.

In 1958, a commuter train headed for New York City plunged into Newark Bay after missing a stop signal and sliding off the open Newark Bay lift bridge, killing 48 people.

In 1959, Nikita Khrushchev became the first Soviet head of state to visit the United States as he arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.

In 1978, Muhammad Ali became the first boxer to capture the heavyweight title three times, winning by unanimous decision in his rematch with Leon Spinks.

In 2008, as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 in the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.

Today’s Birthdays:

• Writer-director Ron Shelton is 79.
• Actor Tommy Lee Jones is 78.
• Film director Oliver Stone is 78.
• Football coach Pete Carroll is 73.
• TV personality Lisa Vanderpump is 64.
• Football Hall of Famer Dan Marino is 63.
• Actor Josh Charles is 53.
• Olympic gold medal swimmer Tom Dolan is 49.
• Actor Tom Hardy is 47.
• Actor Amy Davidson is 45.
• Actor Dave Annable is 45.
• Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, is 40.
• TV personality Heidi Montag is 38.

SpaceX’s capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the predawn darkness, carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot.

They pulled off the first private spacewalk while orbiting nearly 460 miles (740 kilometers) above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft hit a peak altitude of 875 miles (1,408 kilometers) following Tuesday’s liftoff.

Isaacman became only the 264th person to perform a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union scored the first in 1965, and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis the 265th. Until now, all spacewalks were done by professional astronauts.

“We are mission complete,” Isaacman radioed as the capsule bobbed in the water, awaiting the recovery team. Within an hour, all four were out of their spacecraft, pumping their fists with joy as they emerged onto the ship’s deck.

It was the first time SpaceX aimed for a splashdown near the Dry Tortugas, a cluster of islands 70 miles (113 kilometers) west of Key West. To celebrate the new location, SpaceX employees brought a big, green turtle balloon to Mission Control at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company usually targets closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of poor weather forecasts prompted SpaceX to look elsewhere.

During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open barely a half-hour. Isaacman emerged only up to his waist to briefly test SpaceX’s brand new spacesuit followed by Gillis, who was knee high as she flexed her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillis, a classically trained violinist, also held a performance in orbit earlier in the week.

The spacewalk lasted less than two hours, considerably shorter than those at the International Space Station. Most of that time was needed to depressurize the entire capsule and then restore the cabin air. Even SpaceX’s Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who remained strapped in, wore spacesuits.

SpaceX considers the brief exercise a starting point to test spacesuit technology for future, longer missions to Mars.

This was Isaacman’s second chartered flight with SpaceX, with two more still ahead under his personally financed space exploration program named Polaris after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed sum for his first spaceflight in 2021, taking along contest winners and a pediatric cancer survivor while raising more than $250 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

For the just completed so-called Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of the Shift4 credit card-processing company shared the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman won’t divulge how much he spent.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Today in history:

On Sept. 14, 1901, President William McKinley died in Buffalo, New York, of gunshot wounds inflicted by an assassin eight days prior; Vice President Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him, becoming the youngest-ever U.S. president at age 42.

Also on this date:

In 1847, during the Mexican-American War, U.S. forces under Gen. Winfield Scott took control of Mexico City.

In 1927, modern dance pioneer Isadora Duncan died in Nice, France, when her scarf became entangled in a wheel of the sports car in which she was riding.

In 1982, Princess Grace of Monaco, formerly film star Grace Kelly, died at age 52 of injuries from a car crash the day before.

In 1991, the government of South Africa, the African National Congress and the Inkatha (in-KAH’-tah) Freedom Party signed a national peace pact.

In 1994, on the 34th day of a strike by players, Acting Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig announced the 1994 season was over.

In 2001, Americans packed churches and public squares on a day of remembrance for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. President George W. Bush prayed with his Cabinet and attended services at Washington National Cathedral, then flew to New York, where he waded into the ruins of the World Trade Center and addressed rescue workers in a show of resolve.

In 2012, fury over an anti-Muslim film ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad sparked violent clashes across the Muslim world.

Today’s Birthdays:

• Actor Walter Koenig (KAY’-nihg) (“Star Trek”) is 88.
• Architect Renzo Piano is 87.
• Basketball Hall of Fame coach Larry Brown is 84.
• Actor Sam Neill is 77.
• Country singer John Berry is 65.
• Actor Melissa Leo is 64.
• Actor Faith Ford is 60.
• Film director Bong Joon-Ho is 55.
• Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is 54.
• Actor Kimberly Williams-Paisley is 53.
• Actor Andrew Lincoln is 51.
• Rapper Nas is 51.
• Olympic gold medal middle-distance runner Hicham El Guerrouj is 50.
• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is 46.
• Chef/TV personality Katie Lee is 43.
• Actor Jessica Brown Findlay is 37.
• NBA All-Star Jimmy Butler is 35.
• Golfer Tony Finau is 35.
• Actor Emma Kenney is 25.

“Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies,″ Francis said.

The Argentine Jesuit was asked to provide counsel to American Catholic voters during an airborne news conference while he flew back to Rome from his four-nation tour through Asia. Francis stressed that he is not an American and would not be voting.

Neither Republican candidate Donald Trump nor the Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, was mentioned by name.

But Francis nevertheless expressed himself in stark terms when asked to weigh in on their positions on two hot-button issues in the U.S. election — abortion and migration — that are also of major concern to the Catholic Church.

Francis has made the plight of migrants a priority of his pontificate and speaks out emphatically and frequently about it. While strongly upholding church teaching forbidding abortion, Francis has not emphasized church doctrine as much as his predecessors.

Francis said migration is a right described in Scripture and that anyone who does not follow the Biblical call to welcome the stranger is committing a “grave sin.”

He was also blunt in speaking about abortion. “To have an abortion is to kill a human being. You may like the word or not, but it’s killing,” he said. “We have to see this clearly.”

Asked what voters should do at the polls, Francis recalled the civic duty to vote.

“One should vote, and choose the lesser evil,” he said. “Who is the lesser evil, the woman or man? I don’t know.

“Everyone in their conscience should think and do it,” he said.

It’s not the first time Francis has weighed in on a U.S. election. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Francis was asked about Trump’s plan to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Francis declared then that anyone who builds a wall to keep out migrants “is not Christian.”

In responding Friday, Francis recalled that he celebrated Mass at the U.S.-Mexico border and “there were so many shoes of the migrants who ended up badly there.”

Trump pledges massive deportations, just as he did in his first White House bid, when there was a vast gulf between his ambitions and the legal, financial and political realities of such an undertaking.

The U.S. bishops conference, for its part, has called abortion the “preeminent priority” for American Catholics in its published voter advice. Harris has strongly defended abortion rights and has emphasized support for reinstating a federal right to abortion.

In his comments, the pope added: “On abortion, science says that a month from conception, all the organs of a human being are already there, all of them. Performing an abortion is killing a human being. Whether you like the word or not, this is killing. You can’t say the church is closed because it does not allow abortion. The church does not allow abortion because it’s killing. It is murder.”

However, cells are only beginning the process of developing organs in the earliest weeks of pregnancy. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that by 13 weeks, all major organs have formed. For example, cardiac tissue starts to form in the first two months — initially a tube that only later evolves into the four chambers that define a heart.

In other comments, Francis:

— denied a French media report that he would travel to Paris for the December inauguration of the restored Notre Dame Cathedral, saying flat-out he would not be there. But he confirmed he would like to go to the Canary Islands to highlight the plight of migrants.

— tamped down renewed speculation that he might finally return to Argentina later this year, saying he wants to go but that nothing had been decided. He added: “There are various things to resolve first.” Francis has not been home since before the 2013 conclave that elected him pope.

— declared that China was “a promise and a hope” for the Catholic Church and hoped to one day visit.

— called sexual abuse “demonic” and weighed on the latest revelations of assault against a legendary French priest, Abbe Pierre.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Today in history:

On Sept. 13, 2008, crews rescued people from their homes in an all-out search for thousands of Texans who had stayed behind overnight to face Hurricane Ike.

Also on this date:

In 1788, the Congress of the Confederation authorized the first national election and declared New York City the temporary national capital.

In 1971, a four-day inmate rebellion at the Attica Correctional Facility in western New York ended as police and guards stormed the prison; the ordeal and final assault claimed the lives of 32 inmates and 11 hostages.

In 1997, a funeral was held in Calcutta, India, for Nobel peace laureate Mother Teresa.

In 1993, at the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands after signing an accord granting limited Palestinian autonomy.

In 2010, Rafael Nadal beat Novak Djokovic to win his first U.S. Open title and complete a career Grand Slam.

In 2021, school resumed for New York City public school students in the nation’s largest experiment of in-person learning during the coronavirus pandemic.

Today’s Birthdays:

• Actor Barbara Bain is 93.
• Nobel Peace Prize laureate Óscar Arias is 84.
• Rock singer David Clayton-Thomas (Blood, Sweat & Tears) is 83.
• Actor Jacqueline Bisset is 80.
• Singer Peter Cetera is 80.
• Actor Jean Smart is 73.
• Record producer Don Was is 72.
• Chef Alain Ducasse is 68.
• Rock singer-musician Dave Mustaine (Megadeth) is 63.
• Olympic gold medal sprinter Michael Johnson is 57.
• Filmmaker Tyler Perry is 55.
• Fashion designer Stella McCartney is 53.
• Former tennis player Goran Ivanisevic (ee-van-EE’-seh-vihch) is 53.
• Country musician Joe Don Rooney (Rascal Flatts) is 49.
• Singer-songwriter Fiona Apple is 47.
• Actor Ben Savage is 44.
• Soccer player Thomas Müller is 35.
• Rock singer Niall Horan (One Direction) is 31.
• Actor Lili Reinhart (TV: “Riverdale”) is 28.

JENIN, West Bank (AP) — In the web of battered, sun-baked streets winding up the hillside, bloodshed is as unrelenting as the heat. So it is not hard to see why, when raid sirens and gunfire erupted yet again on a morning in late May, 15-year-old Mahmoud Hamadneh turned his bike down an alley that held out the promise of refuge.

The narrow lane, a few hundred yards from his school, looks like an urban oasis, shaded by olive branches that reach across walls on either side. On a recent afternoon the cooing of doves and whine of cicadas amplified its stillness. Only the faded stain of Mahmoud’s blood in the pavement and a stone, hand-lettered with his name, betrayed the illusion.

“He didn’t do anything. He didn’t make a single mistake,” says Amjad Hamadneh, whose son, a buzz-cut devotee of computer games, was one of two teens killed that morning in the opening minutes of a raid by Israeli forces.

“If he’d been a freedom fighter or was carrying a weapon, I would not be so emotional,” says his father, an unemployed construction worker. “But he was taken just as easily as water going down your throat. He only had his books and a pencil case.”

Jenin’s refugee camp has long been notorious as a hotbed of Palestinian militancy, raided repeatedly by Israeli forces who have occupied the West Bank since seizing control in their 1967 war with neighboring Arab states. During the two-day raid that began the morning of May 21, Israeli troops traded fire with Palestinian gunmen. Combatant groups said eight of the 12 Palestinians killed were their fighters.

But the casualties that day, and many others in recent months, went beyond armed men engaged in the region’s seemingly endless conflict. As the world’s attention focuses on the far more deadly war in Gaza less than 80 miles away, scores of Palestinian teens have been killed, shot and arrested in the West Bank, where the Israeli military has waged a months-long crackdown.

More than 150 teens and children 17 or younger have been killed in the embattled territory since Hamas’ brutal attack on communities in southern Israel set off the war last October. Most died in nearly daily raids by the Israeli army that Amnesty International says have used disproportionate and unlawful force. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

Youths represent almost a quarter of the nearly 700 Palestinians slain in the West Bank since the war began, the most since the violent uprising known as the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. More than 20 Israeli civilians and soldiers have been killed in the territory since October.

At the same time, Israel, which has long jailed Palestinians from the West Bank without charge, has extended that practice to many more teens. After October, food deprivation, overcrowding of cells and other mistreatment escalated sharply, the recently released and advocates say.

It is clear from statements by the Israeli military, insurgents and families in the West Bank that a number of the Palestinian teens killed in recent months were members of fighting groups.

Many others were killed during protests or when they or someone nearby threw rocks or home-made explosives at military vehicles. Still others appear to have been random targets. Taken together, the killings raise troubling questions about the devaluation of young lives in pursuit of security and autonomy.

Grief over those deaths has been shadowed by trepidation. Israeli raids won’t eliminate militant groups, survivors say. Instead, some fear, the pain of losing so many youths risks the opposite – pulling siblings, friends and classmates left behind into the region’s vortex of vengeance.

An intense crackdown

After Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel last October and took 250 others hostage, long-smoldering tensions exploded.

Israel responded with a sweeping military campaign in Gaza that Palestinian authorities say has killed more than 40,000 people. That has fueled anger and insurgency in the West Bank, where Israeli forces police about 3 million Palestinians while assigned to protect 500,000 Jewish settlers.

The embattled territory was already seeing deadly clashes before the war began. But Israel’s military has significantly stepped up raids in the months since, characterized by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the larger battle in Gaza and along the border with Lebanon to permanently disable fighting groups that have long threatened his country’s security.

“I can assure you one thing: What has been is not what will be,” he told commanders during a June meeting in the West Bank. “We will change this reality.”

A military spokesman said the Israeli army makes great efforts to avoid harming civilians during raids and “does not target civilians, period.” He said human rights groups focus on a few outlier cases.

Military operations in the West Bank are fraught because forces are pursuing combatants, many in their teens, who often hide among the civilian population, said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani.

“In many cases many of them are 15, 16 years old who are not wearing uniforms and might surprise you with a gun, with a knife,” he said.

But critics say the crackdown is shaped by retribution, not only military strategy.

“The pressure is similar to post-Second Intifada, but there’s something different. And that something different is Oct. 7th,” says Nadav Weiman, a former Israeli army sniper who leads Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation veterans’ group that gathers testimony from soldiers assigned to the West Bank and Gaza.

Throughout the military ranks “there is a feeling of revenge,” he says. Many soldiers view Palestinians “as an entity. They are not individuals. So you unleash your anger everywhere.”

The crackdown extends to the military’s treatment of jailed teens, says Ayed Abu Eqtaish of Defense for Children International-Palestine, an advocacy group. Israeli authorities have declared it a terrorist organization, alleging ties to a Palestinian nationalist faction.

With the military holding more teens without charge in grim conditions, while restricting communication, families are increasingly uncertain of their wellbeing, Eqtaish says.

“After Oct. 7,” he says, “everything deteriorated.”

War in an instant

Even before Israel launched a major military operation in the West Bank in late August, its troops had raided Jenin dozens of times since the war began.

Yet throughout the city’s urbanized refugee camp, where concrete homes wedge against one another on streets ripped up by military bulldozers, there are many indicators that fighters remain entrenched.

Signs at the perimeter of the camp, opened in 1953 to house Palestinians who fled or were driven from what is now Israel in the war following its establishment, mark the territory of the Jenin Brigades, an umbrella organization of militant groups.

Guards stop cars they don’t recognize, especially those with Israeli plates. Posters of smiling young men armed with assault rifles — tributes to fighters killed in clashes — decorate walls and utility poles.

For years, Amjad Hamadneh and wife Kholoud planned for the day they would take their children away from all this. In the meantime, their home in the uppermost reaches of the camp – with a grandfather clock presiding over the living room and bedrooms filled with children’s toys and son Mahmoud’s beloved computer — kept them on the fringes of conflict.

Most days Amjad, 46, left home around 3:30 a.m. to reach a construction job in northern Israel. That income was lost when Israel suspended work permits for Palestinians last October. By then, though, he’d begun building a home on a plot near the city of Nablus.

The couple envisioned a place that would last for decades, with apartments for their twin sons and daughter when they eventually married. To help pay for it, they moved the boys from a private academy to the public Al Karamah school at the base of the hill.

“All of my work, all of my life was for them,” Amjad says.

On the morning of May 21, a Tuesday, the Hamadneh brothers rushed off to make a scheduled final exam. Down the hillside, Osama Hajir, a former classmate who had dropped out of school to work, left home on his motorcycle to begin a day of deliveries. It was just after 7:30 a.m.

In Jenin, though, any hour can see the camp morph into a war zone.

It might start like it did one recent afternoon, when a guard outside the camp’s Ottoman Era train depot mentioned that unmarked military vehicles had been spotted on the outskirts.

A minute or two later sirens began screaming, warning that special forces were already in the camp. Shopkeepers yanked down their gates. Fleeing residents drove against one-way traffic. Many were still seeking shelter when the sound of gunfire sliced through the summer air.

When the sirens erupted that morning in May, Amjad Hamadneh says, he called Mahmoud on his cellphone and was relieved to hear that the brothers had reached their school, behind walls painted with student murals.

Then son Ahmed called back to say that the principal had dismissed classes. As students poured into the street, the brothers were separated in the chaos.

Rushing for their electric bikes, classmate Karam Miazneh saw Mahmoud ahead of him. Both were still within a few hundred yards of the school when witnesses say a sniper in an upper floor window of a recently completed apartment building began firing at people and cars below.

Karam veered into an alley, raising a textbook overhead to show he was a student, as four bullets ripped past him. Then a fifth exploded into his shoulder and he dropped to the ground.

At the mouth of the next block, four bullets hit Mahmoud as he raced toward the alley walls, before another pierced his skull. He was the third student from his school killed in a raid since the war began.

A few blocks away, his former classmate, Osama, lay fatally wounded on the pavement. The dead that morning also included a teacher from the primary school next to Mahmoud’s and a doctor from the hospital down the street.

“Now when I hear the sound of sirens I go to my room and stay there,” says Karam, showing the shrapnel and bone fragments doctors removed from his shoulder. “I’m still in fear that they will come to shoot me and kill me.”

The Israeli army said in a statement to the AP that it has stepped up raids since Oct. 7 to apprehend fighters suspected of carrying out attacks in the West Bank and that “the absolute majority of those killed during this period were armed or involved in terrorist activities at the time of the incident.”

Immediately after the May raid, a spokesman for the army said it had carried out the operation with Israeli border police and the country’s internal security agency, destroying an explosive device laboratory and other structures used by fighters. But police recently declined to comment, and three weeks after the AP asked the military to answer questions about the May raid, an army spokesman said he was unable to comment until he could confer with police.

When Amjad Hamadneh heard his son had been wounded, he sped through Jenin’s twisting streets, drawing gunfire as he neared the hospital. But Mahmoud was already gone. The grief was so intense, his father says, that he couldn’t bear to remain in the building.

“God has given and God has taken away,” he told his wife as he ushered her away.

Nearby, Osama’s father, Muhamad, broke down as he leaned over his son’s body. Months earlier he’d snapped a photo of the smiling teen beside graffiti touting Jenin as “the factory of men,” tirelessly cranking out fighters in the resistance against Israel. Now, he pressed that same, still-smooth face between his hands.

“Oh, my son. Oh, my son,” he sobbed. “My beautiful son.”

Punishing conditions

In a village a half-hour’s drive from Jenin, Qasam Masarweh recounts an odyssey that began months before the war. On that night, he lost his right hand to an Israeli stun grenade. But in the weeks after Oct. 7, the soft-spoken teen says, his encounter with the military turned even more punishing.

“Before Oct. 7 there were six of us in the cell. Afterwards, there were 12,” says Masarweh, who was held for months without charge in Israel’s Megiddo Prison. “There were beatings. There was no food. Our clothes were taken from us. There were so many ways of humiliation.”

Since its war with Hamas began, Israel has more than doubled the number of Palestinians jailed without charge, known as administrative detention. The vast majority are men.

But the number of teens in administrative detention has also increased sharply. Of more than 200 Palestinian youths 17 or younger in military prisons in June, 75 were in administrative detention, the most since watchdog groups began collecting figures. Last year at the same time, 18 youths were being held without charge.

Like their adult counterparts, teens released recently report severe mistreatment following the October attack.

“The big change is definitely in detention conditions. The gloves have really come off,” said Gerard Horton, co-founder of Military Court Watch, which gathers testimony from Palestinian prisoners.

“We never used to document that much violence in relation to children. There was some, but it wasn’t commonplace,” he says.

Israeli officials have acknowledged toughening treatment of Palestinian prisoners since October, while still abiding by international law. A spokesperson for far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose ministry oversees prisons, said that policy, intended to deter terrorism, does not provide any special conditions for prisoners 17 and under.

“They are terrorists just like any other terrorists, there’s no difference,” said the spokesman, Yedidya Grossman.

Masarweh, who turned 18 late last year, says his odyssey began in June 2023, the night before his last high school exam. As he walked home from meeting friends, military vehicles entered his village of Rumannah, firing an object that landed at his feet. Assuming it contained tear gas, he reached down to throw it away.

When the grenade exploded, it blew off most of his right hand. Discharged after nine days in a Jenin hospital, he stopped to visit an aunt in the refugee camp. When a raid began, soldiers stormed the house, beating the teen before taking him into custody.

Masarweh, who says he hoped to become a veterinarian before losing his hand, was ordered held for four months without charge. After Oct. 7, treatment turned even harsher. Authorities immediately reduced food and took away blankets and soap. They packed his cell with prisoners, all 17 or younger, requiring half to sleep on the floor.

A 17-year-old arrested in a raid on the Qalquilya refugee camp told Horton’s group that after Oct. 7 guards confiscated all personal belongings from prisoners, denying them time outside or showers.

Another said guards removed window panels, making cells uncomfortably chilly for prisoners left only with what they’d been wearing at the time of their arrest.

The mistreatment, Masarweh says, continued until late November when guards cuffed his remaining hand and took him from the cell for questioning. After telling an investigator he did not know why he had been arrested, he was transferred to another prison without explanation.

Finally, after midnight, Red Cross officials entered to tell him he would be released in a deal trading Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages.

Back at home, Masarweh says he still worries about the new arrivals that more seasoned prisoners called “cubs,” who he left behind. With the stump at the base of his arm wrapped in gauze, he is uncertain about how he will earn a living.

“It’s already hard enough to take care of yourself with two hands,” he says. “Imagine doing it with one.”

Boys of war

On the June afternoon that 17-year-old Issa Jallad was killed, video from a neighbor’s security camera shows, he was on a friend’s motorbike with an Israeli armored vehicle in close pursuit.

Was the teen – declared a holy warrior on a poster outside his family’s Jenin home showing him cradling an assault rifle – armed that day? Exactly what happened in the moments before he was shot?

The grainy tape, reviewed by The Associated Press days after the June 6 raid, and others from nearby cameras, raise but do not fully answer difficult questions about where he fit in a conflict with no clear boundaries.

“We were going to have one celebration and now we will have two,” says his sister, Rania, 24, whose marriage had long been planned for three days after the raid. “My wedding and the martyrdom of my brother.”

It’s clear that a number of Palestinian youths killed in recent months belonged to fighter groups. Many others died in countless scenarios where lines between civilian and combatant are blurred. Some threw rocks or home-made explosives at military vehicles. Others served as lookouts. Some hung near fighters, aspiring to one day join their ranks.

“All of this generation, not only my son, if you ask them what they want to be, they will say ‘I want to be a militant and defend my country’,” says Mawaheb Morei, the mother of a 15-year-old killed in an October drone attack. The family says he was hanging out in a cemetery where several militants were present.

Two years before her son was killed, Morei says, she confiscated and dismantled a plastic rifle he used to play fighter. But that did nothing to dissuade him.

The Israeli army, responding to questions from the AP about the killing of Jallad in the June raid, said that its soldiers had spotted two combatants handling a powerful explosive device. When the pair tried to flee, troops opened fire and “neutralized them.” It said the circumstances of the incident are under review.

But an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, says its review of multiple security camera videos showed Jallad and his friend were well-removed from where troops and fighters clashed, and that the pair posed no threat.

Jallad’s brother, Mousa, says the teen had gone out to move a car so it wouldn’t be hit by a military vehicle. His sister said the family is proud of him and that when she has children they will carry on the resistance.

“We all expected to be in this situation,” Mousa Jallad said as neighbors came to pay condolences. “I knew this could happen. It could happen to any of us.”

Burying the young

The old cemetery, with a water dispenser under shade trees for weary mourners, had run out of space. So last year residents cleared a lot across the road from an elementary school, turning it into a graveyard for Jenin’s most recent casualties.

It is filling fast.

A row back from where the Hamadnehs buried their son in May rests a 14-year-old classmate who died in a November raid. Two graves over, a stone plastered with the photo of a smiling boy in a bowtie memorializes an 8-year-old killed days later while accompanying youths who threw rocks at military vehicles.

Just beyond, banners picturing dead men and boys, many holding assault rifles, line a wall. One honors a 17-year-old fighter. Another mourns 15-year-old Eid Morei, who told his mother he wanted to become one.

Since Mahmoud Hamadneh was killed, his siblings ask frequently to visit his grave. His younger sister now sleeps in his bed so her surviving brother, Ahmed, will not be in the room alone. But there is no filling the emptiness of Mahmoud’s absence.

“I feel like I cannot breathe. We used to do everything together,” Ahmed says. His father listens closely, despairing later that such grief could drive the teen into militancy. If the risk is so clear to a Palestinian father, he says, why don’t Israeli soldiers see it?

“They think that if they kill us that people will be afraid and not do anything,” he says. “But when the Israelis kill someone, 10 fighters will be created in his place.”

Associated Press reporters Josef Federman and Melanie Lidman in Jerusalem and Thalia Beaty in New York contributed to this story.