By TIA GOLDENBERG

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli naval forces, far from the country’s shores, intercepted and seized a Gaza-bound ship carrying international activists, including Greta Thunberg, in an early morning raid Monday. The operation sparked accusations that Israel’s actions, apparently in the high seas, were a breach of international law.

The activists say their journey was meant to protest Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there. The ship was carrying aid destined for people in Gaza, including baby formula and food. The activists, including Thunberg, were detained and were headed to Israel for likely deportation.

It’s not the first time Israel has halted ships carrying aid bound for the Palestinian territory. A raid in 2010 descended into violence between activists and Israeli commandos, leaving eight Turks and one Turkish-American killed. Most of the other operations against Gaza-bound boats have ended uneventfully, with ships diverted and activists detained.

Israel says the latest ship planned to violate its blockade on Gaza and says it acted in accordance with international law.

Can Israel storm a ship in the high seas? Here is a look at the legal debate.

Intercepted far off the coast of Gaza

The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, which organized the latest ship, says the Madleen was intercepted in international waters some 200 kilometers (124 miles) off the coast of Gaza, a claim that could not be independently verified. Israeli authorities have not disclosed the location where the ship was halted.

Robbie Sabel, an international law expert and former legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea stipulates that a state only has jurisdiction up to 12 nautical miles (19 kilometers) from its shores.

In general, states don’t have the right to seize ships in international waters, but there are exceptions, including during armed conflict, Sabel added.

He said that even before the latest war, Israel was in an armed conflict with Hamas, allowing it to intercept ships it suspected were violating its longstanding blockade of Gaza, which Egypt also enforced. Rights groups have long criticized the blockade as unlawful collective punishment against Palestinians. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

Sabel cited a U.N. report on the 2010 raid that ended in activist fatalities, which stated that “attempts to breach a lawfully imposed naval blockade place the vessel and those on board at risk.” The debate over the legality of Israel’s blockade remains unresolved among legal experts.

The U.N. report urged states to be cautious in the use of force against civilian vessels and called on humanitarian missions to deliver aid through regular channels. It said a country maintaining a naval blockade “must abide by their obligations with respect to the provision of humanitarian assistance.”

A debate over Israel’s right to act

Yuval Shany, an expert on international law at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said that so long as Israel’s blockade of Gaza is “militarily justified” — meant to keep out weapons — and the ship intended to break it, Israel can intercept the vessel after prior warning.

Whether the blockade is militarily justified is also up for debate.

Suhad Bishara, head of the legal department at Adalah, a legal rights group in Israel representing the activists, said Israel was not justified in acting against a ship in international waters that posed no military threat.

“In principle, Israel cannot extend an arm into international waters and carry out whatever action against a ship there,” she said.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein said that “everything that was done was done in accordance with international law,” referring to the ship takeover.

Gaza and Israel’s obligations under international law

Rights groups say the legal questions are complicated by Gaza’s unique status.

The United Nations and much of the international community view Gaza as Israeli-occupied territory, along with east Jerusalem and the West Bank, all of which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians want the three territories to form their future state.

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Israel argues that it withdrew from Gaza in 2005, when it pulled out its soldiers and settlers, even though it maintained control over Gaza’s coastline, airspace and most of its land border. Hamas, which does not accept Israel’s existence, seized power in Gaza two years later.

Amnesty International says Israel has an obligation as the occupying power to make sure that Palestinians in Gaza have enough access to humanitarian supplies, something Amnesty says Israel was preventing by not allowing the Madleen through.

Amnesty and other groups see the seizure of the Madleen as part of a campaign by Israel throughout the war to limit or entirely deny aid into Gaza.

Israel says it has allowed enough aid to enter Gaza to sustain the population and accuses Hamas of siphoning it off, while U.N. agencies and aid groups deny there has been any systematic diversion.

Israel’s aid policy during the war has driven the territory toward famine, experts say, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is accused by the International Criminal Court of using starvation as a method of warfare by restricting humanitarian aid into Gaza, charges he has rejected.

“By forcibly intercepting and blocking the Madleen, which was carrying humanitarian aid and a crew of solidarity activists, Israel has once again flouted its legal obligations towards civilians in the occupied Gaza Strip,” Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, said in a statement.

The group called for the immediate and unconditional release of the activists, who it said were on a humanitarian mission.

By MARI YAMAGUCHI

TOKYO (AP) — An explosion at a storage site for unexploded ordnance at a U.S. military base on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa injured four Japanese soldiers, though the injuries are not life-threatening, officials said Monday.

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The four soldiers sustained finger injuries while working at a facility that belongs to Okinawa prefecture and temporarily stores unexploded ordnance, mostly from wartime and found on the island, local officials said. One of the harshest battles of World War II was fought on Okinawa.

Prefectural officials said the injuries were not life-threatening, but no other details were immediately known.

The U.S. Air Force said in a statement that the explosion occurred at the facility managed by the Okinawa prefectural government at Kadena Air Base’s munitions storage area. It said no U.S. servicemembers were involved in the incident.

The Self Defense Force’s joint staff said one of the devices suddenly exploded when the soldiers were inspecting it at the facility. The blast occurred when the soldiers were trying to remove rust, NHK television reported.

The SDF said they are trying to confirm what caused the accident.

Monday’s accident was believed to be the first ever since the 1974 launch of the Japanese army’s unexploded ordnance disposal unit.

Hundreds of tons of unexploded wartime bombs, many of them dropped by the U.S. military, remain buried around Japan and are sometimes dug up at construction sites and elsewhere. Many of them are still found on Okinawa, where about 1,856 tons of unexploded U.S. bombs are believed to remain.

In October, an unexploded wartime U.S. bomb exploded at a commercial airport in southern Japan, causing a large crater and suspending dozens of flights.

By BRUCE SHIPKOWSKI

Sixteen states have sued the Trump administration over its plan to allow the sale of forced-reset triggers that make semiautomatic rifles fire more rapidly and return devices already seized to their owners.

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The suit announced Monday argues that returning the triggers would violate federal law, pose a threat to residents and law enforcement and worsen gun violence. It was filed in federal court in Maryland.

There had been several legal battles over the devices, which replace the typical trigger on an AR-15-style rifle. The Biden administration had previously argued the triggers qualify as machine guns under federal law because constant finger pressure on the triggers will keep a rifle firing, essentially creating an illegal machine gun.

Rare Breed Triggers, the maker of the devices, had argued that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was wrong in its classification and ignored demands to stop selling the triggers before being sued by the Biden administration.

The Justice Department reached a deal announced last month to allow the sale of forced-reset triggers with Rare Breed Triggers, which was previously represented by David Warrington, Trump’s current White House counsel.

Under the settlement, Rare Breed Triggers agreed not to develop such devices to be used on handguns, according to the Justice Department. The settlement requires the ATF to return triggers that it had seized or that owners had voluntarily surrendered to the government.

The states’ lawsuit is being led by the attorneys general of Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey. Other states involved are Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, along with the District of Columbia.

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

CUPERTINO, Calif. (AP) — After stumbling out of the starting gate in Big Tech’s pivotal race to capitalize on artificial intelligence, Apple will try to regain its footing Monday at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

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The presummer rite, which attracts thousands of developers to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters, is expected to be more subdued than the feverish anticipation that surrounded the event during the previous two years.

In 2023, Apple unveiled a mixed-reality headset that has been little more than a niche product, and last year WWDC trumpeted its first major foray into the AI craze with an array of new features highlighted by the promise of a smarter and more versatile version of its virtual assistant, Siri.

Apple had intended the planned Siri upgrade to herald its long-awaited attempt to become a major player in the AI craze after getting a late start in a phenomenon that so far has been largely been led by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and an array of cutting-edge startups.

Instead, as Apple heads into this year’s showcase, the company faces nagging questions about whether the nearly 50-year-old company has lost some of the mystique and innovative drive that turned it into a tech trendsetter. Instead of making a big splash as it did with the Vision Pro headset, Apple this year is expected to focus on an overhaul of its software that may include a new, more tactile look for the iPhone’s native apps and a new nomenclature for identifying its operating system updates.

Even though it might look like Apple is becoming a technological laggard, Forrester Research analyst Thomas Husson contends the company still has ample time to catch up in an AI race that’s “more of a marathon, than a sprint. It will force Apple to evolve its operating systems.”

If reports about its iOS naming scheme pan out, Apple will switch to a method that automakers have used to telegraph their latest car models by linking them to the year after they first arrive at dealerships. That would mean the next version of the iPhone operating system due out this autumn will be known as iOS 26 instead of iOS 19 — as it would be under the current sequential naming approach.

Whatever it’s named, the next iOS will likely be released as a free update in September, around the same time as the next iPhone models if Apple follows its usual road map.

Meanwhile, Apple’s references to AI may be less frequent than last year when the technology was the main attraction.

While some of the new AI tricks compatible with the latest iPhones began rolling out late last year as part of free software updates, Apple still hasn’t been able to soup up Siri in the ways that it touted at last year’s conference. The delays became so glaring that a chastened Apple retreated from promoting Siri in its AI marketing campaigns earlier this year.

“It’s just taking a bit longer than we thought,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts last month when asked about the company’s headaches with Siri. “But we are making progress, and we’re extremely excited to get the more personal Siri features out there.”

While Apple has been struggling to make AI that meets its standards, the gap separating it from other tech powerhouses is widening. Google keeps packing more AI into its Pixel smartphone lineup while introducing more of the technology into its search engine to dramatically change the way it works. Samsung, Apple’s biggest smartphone rival, is also leaning heavily into AI. Meanwhile, ChatGPT recently struck a deal that will bring former Apple design guru Jony Ive into the fold to work on a new device expected to compete against the iPhone.

“While much of WWDC will be about what the next great thing is for the iPhone, the unspoken question is: What’s the next great thing after the iPhone?” said Dipanjan Chatterjee, another analyst for Forrester Research.

Besides facing innovation challenges, Apple also faces regulatory threats that could siphon away billions of dollars in revenue that help finance its research and development. A federal judge is currently weighing whether proposed countermeasures to Google’s illegal monopoly in search should include a ban on long-running deals worth $20 billion annually to Apple while another federal judge recently banned the company from collecting commission on in-app transactions processed outside its once-exclusive payment system.

On top of all that, Apple has been caught in the cross-hairs of President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, a key manufacturing hub for the Cupertino, California, company. Cook successfully persuaded Trump to exempt the iPhone from tariffs during the president’s first administration, but he has had less success during Trump’s second term, which seems more determined to prod Apple to make its products in the U.S..

“The trade war and uncertainty linked to the tariff policy is of much more concern today for Apple’s business than the perception that Apple is lagging behind on AI innovation,” Husson said.

The multi-dimensional gauntlet facing Apple is spooking investors, causing the company’s stock price to plunge by nearly 20% so far this year — a decline that has erased $750 billion in shareholder wealth. After beginning the year as the most valuable company in the world, Apple now ranks third behind longtime rival Microsoft, another AI leader, and AI chipmaker Nvidia.