One video from the kibbutz of Be’eri in southern Israel showed armed fighters with burned cars and a bulldozer in the background. Toward the end of the video, which was released on a Hamas-affiliated Telegram channel, four bodies can be seen on the ground.

It is not clear what happened to the fifth hostage.

Be’eri lies just three miles from the eastern border of Gaza.

Alongside other towns and settlements close to Gaza such as Ofakim, Sderot, Yad Mordechai, Kfar Aza, Yated and Kissufim, it was among the first to be targeted by Hamas fighters as they launched Saturday morning’s unprecedented and carefully coordinated killing and hostage-taking spree.

The community of Be’eri was “very badly hit,” Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Lt. Col. Richard Hecht said Monday during a briefing, more than 48 hours after Hamas launched the surprise attack.

Hecht said most Hamas militants in Be’eri had been killed, but Israeli troops were still there attempting to clear the area of any remaining fighters.

“We are still fighting. We thought this morning we would be in a better place,” Hecht said.

As many as 1,000 Hamas fighters breached the border from Gaza, according to Israeli authorities, in an attack that has killed more than 700 Israelis, prompting retaliatory Israeli airstrikes and a formal declaration of war on Sunday.

More than 400 Palestinians have been killed, including 78 children, according to the health ministry in Gaza, and medical care has been complicated by Israel cutting power to the territory.

Hamas militants have taken more than 100 Israelis hostage, including high-ranking army officers, a spokesperson for the group claimed Sunday. It’s believed they are in Gaza but their fate is unknown.

Israel authorities have said that dozens of Israelis are being held hostage in Gaza but have not confirmed exact numbers. In addition to Israeli captives, several other nationalities are believed to have been taken hostage.

Hecht said it was possible that Hamas fighters were still crossing into Israel from Gaza, adding that four fighting divisions had been deployed in the south.

He said around 20 breach points had been totally secured but other points were more vulnerable.

“There are some areas where we are still holding on with tanks and air cover. I can’t deny the fact that there are still people coming in … It’s an ongoing fight,” he said.

International aid groups in Afghanistan are scrambling to send help to survivors of this weekend’s earthquake in the west of the country which left more than 2,000 people dead and many more injured in a war-ravaged nation already stricken by an economic crisis.

The 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck on Saturday 25 miles (40 kilometers) west of Herat city in the western Herat province – the third largest in Afghanistan. It was one of the deadliest quakes to hit Afghanistan in years.

Images showed massive heaps of debris and rubble after buildings collapsed. Crowds of survivors were also seen gathered in the streets for safety.

“The situation is worse than we imagined with people in devastated villages still desperately trying to rescue survivors from under the rubble with their bare hands,” said Thamindri de Silva, national director at World Vision Afghanistan.

Reinforcements from the capital Kabul had arrived to help, de Silva added, “but there was only one hospital and it was at full stretch with serious cases being transferred to other private facilities in the city.”

“Our colleagues and their families are processing this devastation in their hometowns and yet we are responding with everything we have,” de Silva said. “People need urgent medical care, water, food, shelter and help to stay safe.”

Funding from the international community, he added, “has been inadequate.”

“Organizations like ours are able to provide relief and help recovery but without commitment from international governments and donors, more will fall into humanitarian need, displacement will increase and lives will be lost. The world must not look away now.”

UN agencies and partners are continuing to mount emergency operations and deploying more teams to join ongoing humanitarian efforts, spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General Stéphane Dujarric said.

“We are coordinating with the de facto authorities to swiftly assess needs and provide emergency assistance,” Dujarric said.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Sunday expressed solidarity and called on the international community to “come together and support Afghans impacted by the earthquake – many of whom were already in need before this crisis,” he added.

UNICEF, the UN’s children’s fund, has dispatched 10,000 hygiene kits, 5,000 family kits, 1,500 sets of winter clothes and blankets, 1,000 tarpaulins, and basic household items to ongoing humanitarian efforts.

Teams are also conducting additional assessments on the ground and are providing emergency drugs and tents for overburdened health clinics.

“We will make every effort to bring quick relief to those affected,” said Fran Equiza, its representative in Afghanistan.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid on Sunday put the number killed at 2,053 people, with more 1,240 people hurt and 1,320 houses completely or partially destroyed. But there are fears the toll could rise further.

Afghanistan has long been one of Asia’s poorest countries and has been ravaged by conflict for decades.

The Taliban seized power in August 2021, 20 years after their ouster by US troops – an event that saw many major aid groups and NGOs pull out and crucial aid programs halted.

The Taliban’s takeover further isolated Afghanistan from the rest of the world and led to Washington and allies cutting off international funding – crippling an economy already heavily dependent on aid.

The country continues to suffer significant damage from regular earthquakes.

A 5.9 magnitude earthquake last June in the eastern Paktika and Khost provinces bordering Pakistan, killed more than a thousand people.

Last week the World Bank warned that two thirds of Afghan families currently faced “significant challenges in maintaining their livelihoods” – making it harder for Afghans to recover from earthquakes, which have been regularly occuring in the country.

International aid groups have said their ability to respond to calls during major disasters was heavily hampered by the Taliban’s takeover and called for more urgent global aid but only a handful of countries have publicly offered support.

Neighboring China in a statement issued on Sunday by its foreign ministry said that it would do “its best to assist in Afghanistan’s disaster-relief efforts in light of its needs.”

Dozens of people are believed to have been captured in Israel by Hamas fighters over the weekend. They are now being held in locations across Gaza, complicating Israel’s response to the militant group’s deadly attack on Saturday.

Israel is taking pains to establish the exact number of hostages that have been taken into Gaza, an isolated coastal enclave of almost 2 million people crammed into 140 square miles, one of the most densely populated places in the world.

In addition to Israeli captives, there are several other nationalities believed to be taken hostage. Two Mexican nationals, a woman and a man, have “presumably” been taken hostage by Hamas, Mexico’s Foreign Minister Alicia Barcena said on Sunday. At least three Brazilian nationals are also missing, according Brazilian authorities.

Al Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, has warned that Israeli attacks in the area could impact hostages, with its spokesman, Abu Obaida, saying in a recorded audio message Saturday that they were “present in all axes in the Gaza Strip.”

It has been more than 17 years since an Israeli soldier was taken as a prisoner of war in an assault on Israeli territory. And Israel has not seen this kind of infiltration of military bases, towns and kibbutzim since town-by-town fighting in the 1948 war of independence.

Here’s what we know about some of the hostages taken by Hamas.

Music festival

Hundreds of attendees at the Nova music festival ran across the plains of the Negev Desert near Urim, a community close to the Gaza Strip, trying to escape Hamas gunmen pursuing them in vehicles in a terrifying chase. Some were killed and others were seized by armed captors, social media videos showed.

Details of hostages from the attack are beginning to emerge as family members recognize relatives in the clips circulating online.

Her cousin confirmed to the Washington Post that Louk attended the music festival.

“We recognized her by the tattoos, and she has long dreadlocks,” Louk’s cousin told the Washington Post. “We have some kind of hope… Hamas is responsible for her and the others.”

Israeli border communities

Hamas fighters took hostages in the border community Be’eri, and the town of Ofakim, 20 miles east of Gaza, IDF spokesman Brig. Gen. Daniel Hagari said on Saturday, adding that the two locations were the “main focal points” of the unfolding crisis.

In a televised address, he said that there were special forces with senior commanders in the two communities, and fighting was ongoing in 22 locations.

Residents in Be’eri and another community on Israel’s border with Gaza, Nir Oz, told the country’s Channel 12 television station that assailants were going door to door, trying to break into their homes.

Channel 12 also reported that infiltrators had taken hostages in Netiv HaAsara. Israeli authorities did not immediately confirm any details about those reports.

“I don’t even know what the situation is regarding the hostages, and the situation is not looking good,” Yoni Asher said, adding that he tracked his wife’s phone and learned that it was located in Gaza.

Soldiers

Al Qassam Brigades claimed to capture “dozens” of Israeli soldiers on Saturday.

“We bring good news to our (Palestinian) prisoners and our people that the al Qassam Brigades have dozens of captured (Israeli) officers and soldiers in their hands,” the group’s spokesman Abu Obaida said in a post on Telegram. “They have been secured in safe places and resistance tunnels.”

The video, posted to Hamas’ official social media accounts, shows militants yank two clearly terrified and stunned soldiers out of a disabled tank. It’s unclear from the video how the tank was disabled, but Hamas has used drones to drop bombs onto Israeli tanks before.

One of the soldiers is then seen in a short snippet of video being kicked on the ground by the militants. In the next clip, the soldier is seen lying motionless on the ground.

A second video, taken afterward, shows a number of different armed men around the tank. The three soldiers are nowhere to be seen.

The armed men are then seen pulling a fourth Israeli soldier from the tank. The soldier is motionless as he’s dragged down the side of the tank and onto the ground. The armed men are seen stomping on his body.

The terrifying attack was just one of multiple locations hit on Saturday morning by the most sustained and coordinated assault inside Israel ever carried out by Hamas militants.

At least 260 bodies would later be found at the festival site, according to Israeli rescue service Zaka. Some attendees were taken hostage, seen in social media videos being seized by their armed captors.

The outdoor Nova Festival event in a rural farmland area near the Gaza-Israel border was supposed to be an all-night dance party, celebrating the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. But as dawn broke, Gibly said they began hearing sirens and rockets.

Explosions can be heard in video taken by Gibly of her and friends walking through the quickly emptying concert grounds, roughly two miles from the border.

“Ima’le,” someone is heard saying, a common Israeli expression of fear or feeling startled.

Gibly and the others didn’t know it, but less than two miles away, Gaza militants had also begun attacking Israeli tanks and soldiers.

When attendees fled in their cars, Gibly said the roadways became clogged and no one could move. That’s when the gunshots began, she says.

In videos Gibly took, an Israeli military vehicle is seen driving against the flow of traffic as people try to make way for it. Someone outside the car be heard screaming: “Go! Go forward! Go forward!”

That’s when Gibly said she and her friends panicked, abandoned the car, and began running.

‘Like a shooting range’

A video circulating on social media showed hundreds of attendees fleeing their cars, running across an empty field with gunshots echoing in the background.

“It was so terrifying and we didn’t know where to drive to not meet those evil … people,” she said. “I have a lot of friends that got lost at the forest for a lot of hours and got shot like it was a range.”

Gibly is still trying to get in touch with her friends who were also at the concert. She says she doesn’t know if others survived, were taken prisoner, or worse.

The festival’s organizers are helping Israeli security forces locate missing attendees.

Hostage taken to Gaza

Details of hostages from the attack are beginning to emerge as family members recognize relatives in videos circulating from Gaza.

In one video that went viral, an Israeli woman and her boyfriend – identified as Noa Argamani and Avinatan Or, who had attended the festival – were shown being kidnapped.

In it, Argamani was seen on the back of a motorcycle being driven away as she pleaded for help. Or was seen nearby as the motorcycle carrying Argamani rode past, and was eventually apprehended by several men – and made to walk with his hands held behind his back.

Family members and friends of the couple have expressed that they want the video to be widely shared in hopes of locating them and securing their safe release.

“But still, we have people missing. We have friends and families, young and old, everyone that got to Gaza Strip, and we need to do everything and now to get them back,” he said.

“I saw his girlfriend Noa in the video, scared and frightened, I can’t imagine what’s going through her at all – screaming in panic on a motorcycle, when some scumbags are holding her and they don’t let her go,” he said.

“My brother, who is a big guy, two meters tall, trains four times a week, a really strong guy. They held him maybe four or five people and just led them towards the strip, I guess.”

Her cousin confirmed to the Washington Post that Louk attended the music festival.

In the video, Louk is seen motionless. One gunman, carrying a rocket propelled grenade, has his leg draped over her waist; the other holds a clump of her dreadlocks. “Allahu Akbar,” they cheer – meaning “God is great” in Arabic.

Some of the crowd gathered around the truck join in the cheers. One man spits on Louk’s head as the car drives off.

“We recognized her by the tattoos, and she has long dreadlocks,” Louk’s cousin told the Washington Post. “We have some kind of hope … Hamas is responsible for her and the others.”

In a video obtained by German news outlet Bild, Louk’s mother Ricarda said: “This morning my daughter, Shani Nicole Louk, a German citizen, was kidnapped with a group of tourists in southern Israel by Palestinian Hamas.”

“We were sent a video in which I could clearly see our daughter unconscious in the car with the Palestinians and them driving around the Gaza Strip,” she said. “I ask you to send us any help or any news. Thank you very much.”

A British man who broke into Windsor Castle with a loaded crossbow and planned to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II has been handed a nine-year jail sentence.

Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, was arrested on Christmas Day 2021 within the grounds of the royal residence, where the late monarch was staying during the pandemic.

Chail was thought to have scaled the castle’s perimeter with a nylon rope ladder before he was detained. Wearing black clothes and a sinister metal mask, he told a police protection officer, “I am here to kill the Queen,” before being arrested.

In February, Chail pleaded guilty to three charges, including treason and possession of an offensive weapon, at a hearing at London’s Old Bailey court.

Sentencing judge Justice Hilliard jailed him for nine years with a further five years on extended licence, the PA Media news agency reported Thursday.

“The defendant harbored homicidal thoughts which he acted on before he became psychotic,” the judge said. “His intention was not just to harm or alarm the sovereign – but to kill her.”

Chail was sentenced under a “hybrid order” under the Mental Health Act, meaning he will serve his term at Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital until he is well enough to be transferred to prison, according to PA Media.

The court heard that Chail was a “Star Wars” fan who described himself as a “Sith” in a video that he sent to about 20 people after breaching the castle grounds, and had been pushed to break into the castle by his AI chatbot “girlfriend,” the UK news agency reported.

The Old Bailey was also told that Chail wrote in a journal he tried to email his sister that if the sovereign was “unobtainable” he would “have to go for” the prince, an apparent reference to then-Prince Charles, as “he seems to be just as suitable in many ways.”

British media reported that Chail was the first person in the UK to be convicted of treason in over 40 years.

According to PA Media, Chail apologized to the royal family in a letter to the court, in which he expressed his “distress and sadness.”

“He is embarrassed and ashamed he brought such horrific and worrying times to their front door,” his barrister Nadia Chbat said. “He has expressed relief no one was actually hurt.”

A Russian missile strike killed at least 51 people, including a child, in a village near the eastern Ukrainian city of Kupiansk on Thursday, officials say, in one of the deadliest attacks against civilians since the conflict began.

Moscow’s forces targeted a cafe and a shop in Hroza, in the Kharkiv region, soon after midday local time, according to Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko.

Scenes emerged of emergency workers wading through dense rubble in the aftermath of the attack. Doctors are treating the six people injured by the strike.

Bodies of the deceased, including a 6-year-old boy, were removed from the destroyed buildings, said Oleh Synehubov, a regional military official. The bodies of 29 victims have been identified, the Ukrainian interior minister said. The other bodies were sent to facilities in the city of Kharkiv.

There were locals inside the store when the missile ripped through, Ukraine’s interior minister said, triggering a scale of devastation not seen since an attack on a railway station in Kramatorsk in early 2022 killed more than 60 people.

A wake for a fallen Ukrainian soldier was being held at the village cafe when the missile struck, killing several members of the of soldier’s family, Dmytro Chubenko, spokesperson for the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office, told Ukrainian media outlet RBC.

The fallen Ukrainian soldier had previously been buried in the city of Dnipro, but his relatives wanted him to be reburied in the village where he was originally from, Chubenko said.

“The wake was attended by the son of the deceased, who was also a soldier,” he said. “The son, along with his wife and mother, were in a cafe and were killed by a rocket,” he added.

According to the latest death toll, the attack wiped out about one fifth of the village, which was home to 330 people.

There was a similar attack in the nearby town of Pervomaiske, when people were also saying goodbye to a fallen soldier, according Chubenko also said. “His fellow soldiers were present then. Today, there were only civilians at the site of the attack.”

Hroza was hit by an Iskander missile, according to Ukrainian officials. The Iskander is a ballistic missile with a relatively short range, that depending on configuration carries a warhead of between 500 and 700 kilograms.

It has been extensively used by the Russians against Ukraine, causing substantial civilian casualties.

Hroza is located about 40 kilometers from the frontlines of the war near Kupiansk, the city in Kharkiv that Russian forces seized early on in the war before losing it a year ago.

The Ukrainian military has since been trying to resist advances from Moscow. For Kyiv, the city is strategically important to prevent Russia from accessing the nearby Oskil River – where it is much easier to cross than further south.

‘Demonstrably brutal’

Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said the strike shows Kyiv needs more defense systems to “protect our country from terror,” amid fears of dwindling military aid from Western allies.

His comments came amid political upheaval in the US Congress, the lawmaking branch of government, and drained ammunition stocks among NATO countries, which threaten the flow of military aid to Kyiv.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack was “a demonstrably brutal Russian crime – a rocket attack on an ordinary grocery store, a completely deliberate terrorist attack.”

“Russian terror must be stopped. Anyone who helps Russia circumvent sanctions is a criminal. Everyone who still supports Russia is supporting evil,” Zelensky said on the sidelines of a European leaders summit in Granada, in southern Spain.

“Russia needs this and similar terrorist attacks for one thing only: to make its genocidal aggression the new normal for the whole world.”

Zelensky sought reassurance from European leaders on Thursday, telling reporters Europe’s “biggest challenge” will be to preserve its “unity” in the face of Russia’s invasion.

Ukranian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal called the attack “brutal and cynical.”

“Dozens of people were killed, including a child. It is impossible to describe this horror in words,” he posted on Telegram.

“We must stop the Russian terror so that enemy missiles and shells do not take any more lives or injure any more people. This can only be done in a coordinated and united manner, with the help and support of our partners,” Shmyhal added.

The UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine said images arriving from the scene of the attack “are absolutely horrifying,” accusing Russian forces of carrying out a war crime.

“Our thoughts are also with the people of Ukraine, who had to witness today, once again, another barbaric consequence of Russia’s invasion,” Denise Brown said.

“Intentionally directing an attack against civilians or civilian objects is a war crime. Intentionally launching an attack knowing that it would be disproportionate is a war crime.”

When the discovery of fossilized footprints made in what’s now New Mexico was made public in 2021, it was a bombshell moment for archaeology, seemingly rewriting a chapter of the human story. Now new research is offering further evidence of their significance.

While they look like they could have been made yesterday, the footprints were pressed into mud 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, according to radiocarbon dating of the seeds of an aquatic plant that were preserved above and below the fossils.

This date dramatically pushed back the timeline of humans’ history in the Americas, the last landmass to be settled by prehistoric people. The 61 dated prints, which were discovered in the Tularosa Basin, near the edge of an ancient lake in White Sands National Park, were made at a time when many scientists think that massive ice sheets had sealed off human passage into North America, indicating that humans arrived in the region even earlier.

However, some archaeologists questioned the age of the footprints established by those initial findings. The skeptics noted that aquatic plants such as Ruppia cirrhosa — the one used in the 2021 study — can acquire carbon from dissolved atoms in the water rather than the air, which can result in a misleadingly early date.

In a follow-up study published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers said they have produced two new lines of evidence to support their initial dates.

“Even as the original work was being published, we were forging ahead to test our results with multiple lines of evidence,” said Kathleen Springer, research geologist at the US Geological Survey and co-lead author on the new Science paper, in a news release.

“We were confident in our original ages, as well as the strong geologic, hydrologic, and stratigraphic evidence, but we knew that independent chronologic control was critical.”

When and how early humans first migrated to the Americas has long been debated and remains poorly understood. Current estimates for the first inhabitants range from 13,000 years ago to more than 20,000 years ago. However, the earliest archaeological evidence for the region’s settlement is sparse and often controversial, making the footprints especially important.

Confirming the age of ancient footprints

For their follow-up study, the researchers focused on radiocarbon dating of conifer pollen, because it comes from a terrestrial plant and avoids the issues that can arise when dating aquatic plants such as Ruppia, according to the news release.

The scientists were able to isolate some 75,000 grains of pollen, collected from the exact same layers as the original seeds, for each sample. Thousands of grains are required to achieve the mass necessary for a single radiocarbon measurement. The pollen age matched that found for the seeds.

The team also used a dating technique known as optically stimulated luminescence, which determines the last time quartz grains in the fossil sediment were exposed to sunlight. This method suggested that the quartz had a minimum age of 21,500 years.

“The immediate reaction in some circles of the archaeological community was that the accuracy of our dating was insufficient to make the extraordinary claim that humans were present in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum,” said Jeff Pigati, USGS geologist and co-lead author of the study. “But our targeted methodology in this current research really paid off.”

This study helps illuminate the grand story of human evolution, but there’s still much that remains unknown about how the Americas were populated.

It’s not clear whether early humans arrived by boat or came over a land bridge from Asia. Nor, despite advances in genetic evidence, is it clear whether one or many populations of early modern humans made the long journey.

Bente Philippsen, an associate professor and radiocarbon dating expert at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, said determining the age of pollen grain is an “intricate process that comes with a risk of contamination.”

What’s more, she noted in a commentary published alongside the study, dates derived from luminescence have large measurement uncertainties.

However, she said that the new study’s findings overall “strongly indicate” a human presence in the Americas around the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, a period between 19,000 and 26,000 years ago when two massive ice sheets covered the northern third of North America, reaching as far south as New York City, Cincinnati and Des Moines, Iowa.

The ice and cold temperatures would have made a journey between Asia and Alaska impossible during that time, meaning the people who made the footprints likely arrived much earlier.

Jennifer Raff, an associate professor at the University of Kansas and author of “Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas,” said the footprint findings were a “big deal” for the field.

“The American continents were the last step on modern humans’ global journey across the world,” she said via email. “It is fascinating to imagine what it must have been like to enter a new region and contend with the challenges (and opportunities) that new environments would have presented.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested Thursday that it was not an “external” attack that crashed the plane carrying Wagner warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin in August, but hand grenades within the aircraft.

Speaking at the Valdai Forum in Sochi, Putin said the “chairman of the investigative committee just reported a few days ago that the fragments of hand grenades were found in the bodies of the victims. There was no external influence on the plane, it is an established fact.”

Prigozhin, who led a failed uprising against the Kremlin, was among the 10 people on board the private plane which crashed in a field northwest of Moscow in August while en route to St. Petersburg. All on board, including Prigozhin and his top aides, were killed.

The Russian leader, whose government has denied involvement in the crash, did not detail how grenades might have exploded on the plane, but said that he thought investigators should have performed drug or alcohol tests on the bodies of the victims.

“I repeat, in my opinion such an examination should have been carried out but it wasn’t,” he said, also saying that “10 billion in cash and 5 kilos of cocaine” had previously been found by Russian security forces in Wagner’s office in St Petersburg.

Putin said the chairman of the investigation committee said it was ok to “share this information publicly” as it was “an established fact.”

The crash came two months to the day after Prigozhin’s attempted mutiny against Russia’s military leadership, which posed the biggest challenge to Putin’s rule in decades.

In June, Prigozhin and his Wagner troops seized key military sites and marched toward Moscow, where the Kremlin had deployed heavily armed troops to the streets. But before they could face off, a deal was struck that ended the rebellion and sent Prigozhin and his fighters to neighboring Belarus.

Following the deadly crash, Russian officials said they were considering various scenarios surrounding the incident, including the possibility of a “deliberate atrocity,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in late August.

Peskov has denied claims that the Kremlin might have been involved in the plane’s demise, calling such speculation an “absolute lie.”

Drones laden with explosives hit a military college graduation ceremony in the western Syrian city of Homs on Wednesday, killing 80 people, including women and children, and wounding hundreds more, according to Syria’s Minister of Health.

“In a preliminary toll, the terrorist act that targeted the graduation ceremony of students at the Military College in Homs led to the death of 80 martyrs, including 6 children, and the number of injured was 240,” Hassan Al-Ghobash said.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. In an earlier statement, the defense ministry blamed “terrorist organizations supported by well known international parties.”

“There were dozens of wounded soldiers, with critical injuries among the invited families, including women and children, in addition to a number of college students participating in the graduation,” the ministry said in a statement.

The Syrian armed forces said the attack was “unprecedented,” and vowed to respond “with full force and determination, warning that those who planned and executed the attack “will pay dearly.”

The ancient city of Homs, once known as the capital of the Syrian revolution, was the site of intense battles between regime forces and opposition fighters seeking to unseat President Bashar Al Assad in 2012. The city fell to the regime in 2014, when rebels left it after a two-year siege.

Located in the agricultural heartland of central Syria, the city had long been a transport and commercial hub of vital strategic importance. The road through Homs connects the capital, Damascus, in the south to Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, in the north.

Meanwhile, at least eight people were killed on the other side of the country Thursday by Turkish airstrikes targeting Kurdish-controlled areas of northeastern Syria, according to a statement by Kurdish security forces in the region.

“The Turkish state launched on Thursday a series of attacks on our regions with more than 15 drones penetrating the airspace of northeastern Syria, and again targeted many positions, infrastructure, service facilities, and gas and oil stations, resulting in death and injuries. Its aggression also affected areas populated by civilians,” said Asayish, the Kurdish internal security force.

Turkey’s military has launched a series of airstrikes against Kurdish targets in Syria and Iraq following a deadly bombing in the Turkish capital on Sunday. The attack in Ankara was claimed by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has carried out a decades-long insurgency against the government and is classified as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union.

New images from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed surprising pairs of planet-like objects in the Orion Nebula that have never been detected before.

The Orion Nebula, a glowing cloud of dust and gas, is one of the brightest nebulae in the night sky and identifiable as the sword in the Orion constellation. Located 1,300 light-years from Earth, the nebula has long presented astronomers with a wealth of celestial objects to study, including planet-forming disks around young stars and brown dwarfs, or objects with a mass between that of planets and stars.

Astronomers used Webb’s near-infrared camera, called NIRCam, to capture mosaics of the Orion Nebula in short and long wavelengths of light, revealing unprecedented details and unexpected discoveries.

When astronomers Samuel G. Pearson and Mark J. McCaughrean studied the short-wavelength image of the Orion Nebula, they zoomed in on the Trapezium Cluster, a young star-forming region that’s about 1 million years old, filled to the brim with thousands of new stars. In addition to the stars, the scientists spotted brown dwarfs, which are too small to kick-start the nuclear fusion at their cores to become stars. Brown dwarfs have a mass that is below 7% the mass of the sun.

On the hunt for other low-mass isolated objects, the astronomers found something they had never seen: pairs of planet-like objects with masses between 0.6 and 13 times the mass of Jupiter that appear to defy some fundamental astronomical theories.

The scientists dubbed them Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs.

“Although some of them are more massive than the planet Jupiter, they will be roughly the same size and only slightly larger,” said Pearson, a European Space Agency research fellow at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands.

The astronomers found 40 pairs of JuMBOs and two triple systems, all on wide orbits around one another. Although they exist in pairs, the objects are typically about 200 astronomical units apart, or 200 times the distance between Earth and the sun. It can take between 20,000 and 80,000 years for the objects to complete an orbit around each other.

The objects’ temperatures range from 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (537 degrees Celsius) to 2,300 F (1,260 C), Pearson said. The gaseous objects are young, astronomically speaking — about 1 million years old. Our solar system, in comparison, is 4.57 billion years old.

“We are halfway through the life of the sun, so these objects in Orion are 3-day-old babies,” said McCaughrean, senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency. “They’re still quite luminous and warm because the energy they have when they get created still allows them to glow, which is how we can see these things in the first place.”

McCaughrean and Pearson have written two research papers based on their discoveries in the Orion Nebula using the Webb telescope. The studies have been submitted to academic journals for publication, and the preliminary findings are available on a preprint site called arXiv. But many questions about JuMBOs remain — including how they came to be in the first place.

JuMBOs: Upending the rules of astronomy

Stars form from giant clouds of gas and dust that collapse beneath gravitational forces. This process continues as disks of gas and dust swirl around the stars, giving rise to planets. But no existing theories explain how the JuMBOs formed, or why they’re present in the Orion Nebula, McCaughrean said.

For instance, some may consider the JuMBOs to be like rogue planets, or objects of planetary mass that freely travel through space without orbiting stars. But many rogue planets begin by orbiting stars before being ejected, and it would be hard to explain how pairs of them were kicked out at the same time while remaining gravitationally connected to each other.

“Scientists have been working on theories and models of star and planet formation for decades, but none of them have ever predicted that we would find pairs of super low mass objects floating alone in space — and we’re seeing lots of them,” Pearson said. “The main thing that we learn from this is that there is something fundamentally wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation, or both.”

The Orion Nebula is a favorite observational target of astronomers, and the larger and more sophisticated telescopes become, the more objects are revealed within the nebula, McCaughrean said.

“While the objects we are looking at are really faint, they are brightest in the infrared, so that (is) where you have the best chance of detecting them,” Pearson said via email. “JWST is the most powerful infrared telescope that has ever been built and these observations simply wouldn’t be possible with any other telescope.”

Observations of the nebula scheduled for early 2024 could provide more insight into the atmospheric compositions of the JuMBOs, Pearson said. The researchers also want to uncover more details about the objects, including making precise measurements of their masses.

Meanwhile, other research focused on different star-forming regions could reveal whether JuMBOs are elsewhere beyond the Orion Nebula.

“The main question is, ‘What?! Where did that come from?’” Pearson said. “It’s just so unexpected that a lot of future observations and modelling are going to be needed to explain it.”