HBO drama looks at killings of teens

TEL AVIV, Israel -- HBO's new docudrama series about the killings of four Israeli and Palestinian teenagers, violence which set off a cascade of events leading to the 2014 Gaza war, is set to air next week and is likely to reopen wounds on both sides of the conflict.

"Our Boys," co-created by Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, presents a dramatized rendition of the chaotic events of that June following the abduction of three Israeli teens in the West Bank. The series, coproduced by HBO and Israel's Keshet TV, and premiering Aug. 12, looks at the hatred and violence unleashed during one of the decades-old conflict's most frenzied periods.

In June 2014, Gilad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel, and Eyal Yifrah, three Israeli teenagers aged 16 and 19, were abducted and killed by Palestinian militants outside a West Bank settlement. An extensive Israeli military search eventually located their remains about two weeks later. After the discovery, three Israelis kidnapped Mohammed Abu Khdeir, a 16-year-old Palestinian from east Jerusalem, and burned him alive in the woods outside the city.

Israel launched a sweeping crackdown in the West Bank after the three teenagers went missing, and the Islamic militant group Hamas began firing rockets from Gaza in response to the arrests of hundreds of its members. In response, Israel launched a full-scale air and ground invasion of the coastal territory. The 51-day war killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, according to U.N. tallies. At least 73 people were killed on the Israeli side, 67 of them soldiers.

The series was co-created by Joseph Cedar -- twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for "Beaufort" in 2007 and "Footnote" in 2011; Hagai Levi, whose Showtime series "The Affair" won a Golden Globe for best television drama in 2014; and Tawfik Abu-Wael, a Palestinian citizen of Israel whose 2004 movie "Thirst" won a critics award at the Cannes film festival.

"Our Boys" will join the growing ranks of Israeli action dramas appearing on American television, following the success of Netflix's "Fauda" (Chaos), which is set to return for a third season, and "The Red Sea Diving Resort," about a Mossad operation in Sudan that brought Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the 1980s.

Cedar said he and his colleagues approached the story with a "journalistic sensibility" when pre-production began in 2015. "We're trying to bring to the screen something that is as close as possible to the real events, or at least as we understand them."

A cease-fire on Aug. 26, 2014, halted hostilities between Israel and Hamas, but the years since have seen sporadic renewals of violence threatening to drag the two sides back into full-blown war. Israel maintains a blockade on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, and the Islamic militant group still holds two civilian captives and the remains of two Israeli soldiers killed in the war.