How the murder of four teens started a war: the killings sparked a seven-week battle between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

Three Israeli teenagers were on their way home from school in the West Bank on June 12 when they vanished. A few weeks later, the bodies of Eyal Yifrach, 19, and Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Shaar, both 16, were found. They'd been kidnapped and shot dead by Palestinian militants.

In retaliation, Jewish extremists kidnapped and killed Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16, as he waited to pray outside a mosque near his East Jerusalem home on July 2. Khdeir was bludgeoned with a wrench and then set on fire. When the Palestinian boy's body was found later that day, tensions exploded.

Walid Abu Khdeir, Muhammad's cousin, told National Public Radio, "His life was still ahead of him, and here in one minute, extremists who hate Arabs, who hate peace, came in and cut short his whole life."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu captured the anger of Israelis when he said of the Israeli teens, "They were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by beasts. Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay. "

Within days, the militant group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, began firing rockets into Israel, apparently targeting civilian areas. Israel launched devastating airstrikes in Gaza.

The murders of the four teens "are horrible under any circumstances," says Shibley Telhami, a political science professor at the University of Maryland. "But in and of themselves they would not have dragged the sides into this fight if both sides weren't ripe for an explosion. If it weren't these killings, it would have been something else that sparked it."

By the time the seven-week war ended, 73 Israelis, and 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, had been killed. (Israel was criticized, even by allies like the U.S., for the large number of Palestinian civilian deaths. Israel blamed Hamas, saying it deliberately located military operations in densely populated areas.) The physical damage in the 139-square-mile Gaza Strip is estimated at $6 billion. According to the U.N., about 260,000 of Gaza's 1.8 million residents have been displaced by the fighting.

Both sides claim victory: Israel for wiping out 32 underground tunnels that Hamas secretly built in order to sneak into Israel for terrorist attacks, and Hamas for surviving Israel's military onslaught.

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