A 10-year-old boy attending a Japanese school in southern China has died after being stabbed on his way to class on Wednesday, according to Tokyo’s foreign minister, in the second knife attack near a Japanese school in the country in recent months.

The boy was attacked by a man about 200 meters (650 feet) from the gates of the Japanese school in Shenzhen, a tech-hub metropolis home to many Japanese businesses, according to China’s foreign ministry.

A 44-year-old suspect was apprehended at the scene and taken into custody, police in the city said in a statement.

Japanese and Chinese authorities did not specify the nationality of the victim. But Japanese nationality is required for enrollment at the Shenzhen Japanese School, according to its website.

“The fact that such a despicable act was committed against a child on his way to school is truly regrettable,” Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa told reporters Thursday.

“We take this incident extremely seriously, and we have once again requested that the Chinese side ensure the safety of Japanese nationals.”

The attack took place on a sensitive date, the anniversary of the “918” incident in 1931, when Japanese soldiers blew up a Japanese-owned railway in northeast China in a pretext to capture the region.

The emotionally charged day is commemorated in China as the start of Japan’s invasion, with state media and officials urging the public to never forget the national humiliation.

Chinese authorities did not mention the motive for Wednesday’s attack. But nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Japanese sentiment are on the rise in the country, often fanned by state media.

In June, a Chinese man wounded a Japanese woman and her child in a stabbing attack in front of a school bus in Suzhou, eastern China. A Chinese bus attendant who tried to intervene later died of her injuries.

Following that attack, Japan’s foreign ministry told Japanese schools to review their safety measures, Kamikawa said.

Ahead of the 918 anniversary, “we had just made a request to the Chinese foreign ministry to take thorough measures to ensure the safety of Japanese schools, so we are extremely disappointed that this incident occurred in this situation,” she added.

At a regular news conference Wednesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said the case was being investigated.

“China will continue to take effective measures to protect the safety of all foreigners in China,” he added.

Public attacks against foreigners had been rare in China, but a series of high-profile stabbings have raised concerns in recent months.

Two weeks before the Japanese mother and child were attacked in Suzhou, four American college instructors were stabbed by a Chinese man at a public park in Jilin in the northeast, after he bumped into one of them, according to Chinese police.

China’s foreign ministry has described both attacks as isolated incidents and did not release further information on the motives.

Lebanon is reeling after facing deadly back-to-back attacks targeting Hezbollah members – with pagers simultaneously exploding across the country on Tuesday, then walkie-talkies detonating in a similar fashion on Wednesday.

Panic, fear and grief have now gripped the country, with questions swirling about how the attacks could have been carried out, where the devices came from, and whether this latest development could plunge the Middle East into a wider regional conflict.

At least 22 people, including children, have died so far from the two attacks, which Lebanese officials have blamed on Israel. Thousands more are injured – many maimed and in critical condition after communications devices exploded in their pockets or in their face.

While Israel has refused to publicly comment, it warned on Wednesday that a “new era” of war was beginning, appearing to tacitly acknowledge its role.

Here’s what we know so far.

What happened, when and where?

The first attack came on Tuesday afternoon when pagers exploded at the same time across several parts of Lebanon – including the capital Beirut, and in several towns in the central Beqaa valley, strongholds for the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah.

Videos showed the bloody aftermath on streets and public spaces. In one CCTV video, a man was picking out fruit in a supermarket when an explosion detonated – leaving him groaning in pain on the ground, clutching his lower abdomen as panic breaks out around him.

Lebanese hospitals were quickly overwhelmed, with limited staff attending to hundreds of bandaged and bleeding patients – some of whom had to lie on the floor as more of the injured arrived.

The second attack took place on Wednesday, with walkie-talkies detonating in the suburbs of Beirut and in the south of the country.

One witness who cannot be named for security reasons described seeing a man’s hands blown off by an exploding walkie-talkie while attending a Hezbollah funeral. Fires broke out in dozens of homes, stores, and vehicles, with videos showing smoke billowing on chaotic streets.

Why would Israel target Lebanon now?

Hezbollah and Israel have been at conflict for decades – but the two have ramped up their cross-border attacks on each other since last October when the war in Gaza began, following Palestinian militant group Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel.

Hezbollah is part of a larger Iran-led axis across the Middle East spanning Yemen, Syria, Gaza and Iraq that has engaged in a simmering conflict with Israel and its allies over the past 10 months.

The axis has said they will continue striking Israeli targets as long as the war in Gaza goes on, rebranding themselves as a “supportive front” for Palestinians in the strip, as described by a senior Hezbollah leader.

Israel may have chosen this timing for the attacks because it believed Hezbollah had discovered the pagers’ capability – making it a “use it or lose it” moment, said an Israeli source familiar with national security.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may also have wanted to shore up domestic support. Officials and residents from the northern region have become increasingly vocal about the need to return to their homes after being evacuated due to attacks, piling pressure on the government to act against the threat of Hezbollah’s rockets from southern Lebanon.

On Tuesday, Israel made it a new war objective to return Israel’s northern residents to their homes near the border – which has long been understood to be a political necessity.

How did it happen?

There are still many questions on how Israel might have carried out its attacks this week – and where the devices that detonated came from.

Hezbollah is highly secretive, and its leader has previously urged families to dump their cell phones to avoid infiltration from Israeli and US spyware. That’s why so many Hezbollah members and their families rely instead on low-tech wireless communication devices like pagers.

Damaged pagers in Lebanon bore the name of a Taiwanese manufacturer – but the company said the devices were instead made and sold by a Hungarian company in Budapest.

Hungarian authorities denied this, however, saying the Budapest firm was a “trading intermediary” with no manufacturing sites in the country.

Making things even stranger, the address for the company’s office is in a residential area – where other people in the building said they hardly saw people coming to work, and that the Budapest company had never physically been to the building.

Meanwhile, Lebanon said the walkie-talkies that exploded were a discontinued model made by Japanese firm ICOM.

The devices were not supplied by a recognized agent, were not officially licensed and had not been vetted by the security services, Lebanese authorities said. ICOM said the model was discontinued a decade ago, and it could not determine whether the ones used in Lebanon were counterfeit or shipped from its company.

How have Hezbollah, Israel and the world responded?

Hezbollah has vowed retribution, warning on Tuesday that Israel will “definitely receive a fair punishment for this sinful assault, both in ways that are expected and unexpected.”

The Lebanese government also condemned the attack as “criminal Israeli aggression” and a violation of their national sovereignty.

It’s less clear what capacity Hezbollah might have to launch a counterattack if many of its members are wounded and key communication methods are no longer reliable.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant appeared to reference the attacks on Wednesday during a visit to an air force base – praising the “excellent achievements” of the military and intelligence agency.

“We are at the beginning of a new era in this war and we need to adapt ourselves,” Gallant said.

It appears US officials were largely in the dark until reports emerged of the explosions, according to three sources familiar with the matter. Israeli officials notified the US that it was going to carry out an operation in Lebanon on Tuesday but did not give any details about what they were planning, the sources said.

The UN rights chief condemned the attacks, calling them a violation of international humanitarian law and urging an “independent, thorough and transparent investigation.” International NGO Human Rights Watch echoed his remarks, saying the inquiry should be “prompt” and “urgently conducted.”

The suspected attacks against the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah are the latest in a series of covert operations that Israel’s government refuses to acknowledge but which are alleged to have been carried out by Israeli operatives.

Munich massacre response

Israel’s alleged history of planting explosives in telecommunication devices goes back as far as 1972, as part of its revenge for the killing of 11 Israelis, including athletes, at the Munich Olympics, which was carried out by the Palestinian militant group Black September.

In response, Israel launched “Operation Wrath of God” and spent years tracking down those involved in the Munich Massacre.

Mahmoud Hamshari, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative in Paris, was among those targeted. Unidentified operatives reported to be linked to Israeli intelligence broke into his home and planted a bomb in his phone, before another person – posing as an Italian journalist – arranged a telephone interview with Hamshari. When he picked up the call and identified himself, the bomb was activated remotely.

The ‘engineer’

Tuesday’s attacks reminded many of the 1996 killing of Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’ chief bombmaker known as “the engineer,” responsible for killing dozens of Israelis.

Ayyash was killed in Gaza after his cell phone, which had been packed with 50 grams (1.76 ounces) of explosives, blew up near his head. After his killing, dozens of Israelis were killed in four retaliatory suicide bombings.

Iranian nuclear scientists

Since 2010, five Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in foreign-linked assassinations, as Israel tries to prevent its greatest adversary from developing nuclear weapons. In August 2015, at the height of the assassinations, then-Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon cryptically told the German magazine Der Spiegel that he could not be held responsible “for the life expectancy of Iranian scientists.”

Experts believe Israel and the United States were responsible for deploying the complex computer virus called Stuxnet that destroyed centrifuges at an Iranian nuclear facility in 2010.

Iranian officials have said they believe the cyberattack, which targeted centrifuges including those at the Natanz and Bushehr nuclear plants, originated in Israel and the United States, but neither country has commented on the malware’s origin. Notably, Stuxnet was one of the first times a cyberattack had a manifestation outside cyberspace, causing the centrifuges to spin out of control unnoticed. The pager attack is seemingly another instance of a cyberattack causing a physical consequence, unlike stealing money from a bank account or taking down a website.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was Iran’s chief nuclear scientist, was assassinated east of Tehran in 2020 by a remote-controlled machine gun operating out of a nearby Nissan. Iranian officials said the weapon had used artificial intelligence and facial recognition to detect Fakhrizadeh and open fire, before the car, reportedly packed with explosives, self-destructed.

Top Iranian officials blamed Israel for the assassination. Israel did not comment.

Human intelligence

While many of these assassinations have a sci-fi aspect, experts stressed that each operation requires high levels of human intelligence that raised questions about the security protocols of Israel’s adversaries. After Fakhrizadeh’s assassination, intelligence analysts stressed that a country or actor would still have had to smuggle in specialist equipment to stage the operation.

After this week’s events, some speculated that the explosions could have been caused by an Israeli cybersecurity breach that caused the lithium batteries in the pagers to overheat and detonate.

Kennedy said it was more likely that Israel had human operatives in Hezbollah who were able to intercept the supply chain and tamper with the devices. “The pagers would have been implanted with explosives and likely only to detonate when a certain message was received,” he said.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Israel had hidden explosives inside a batch of pagers ordered from Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo and destined for Hezbollah, and that a switch was embedded to detonate them remotely, according to unnamed American and other officials briefed on the operation.

The Iranian government and Hamas say Israel carried out the assassination. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.