It is the latest development in a long struggle by the U.S. military and successive administrations to bring to justice the man charged with planning one of the deadliest attacks ever on the United States. It stalls an attempt to wrap up more than two decades of military prosecution beset by legal and logistical troubles.

A three-judge appeals panel agreed to put on hold Mohammed’s guilty plea scheduled for Friday in a military commission courtroom at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In an unusual move, the Biden administration is pushing to throw out a plea agreement that its own Defense Department had negotiated with Mohammed and two 9/11 co-defendants.

Mohammed is accused of developing and directing the plot to crash hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Another of the hijacked planes flew into a field in Pennsylvania.

A small number of relatives of some of the nearly 3,000 victims already had gathered in Guantanamo to hear Mohammed take responsibility in one of the most painful chapters in American history.

“It’s very upsetting,” said Elizabeth Miller, who lost her firefighter father, Douglas Miller, in the attacks and leads a group of 9/11 families supporting the plea agreements and opposing execution for the defendants.

She sees the deals as “the best way for families to receive finality.”

“It’s unfortunate that the larger government isn’t recognizing it,” she said by phone Thursday from Guantanamo.

But Gordon Haberman, whose daughter, Andrea, was killed at the World Trade Center while on a business trip, took heart.

“If this leads to a full trial for these guys, then I’m in favor of that,” he said.

The appeals panel stressed that its order would hold only as long as it took to more fully consider arguments and that it should not be considered a final ruling.

The court scheduled some of the next steps for Jan. 22, meaning the fight would extend into the Trump administration.

Defense lawyers had worked to wrap up the pleas by President-elect Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. It’s not clear whether Trump would seek to intervene in the military commission’s work.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has led the fight to overturn the politically divisive plea deals, saying a decision on the death penalty in an attack as grave as Sept. 11 should only be made by the defense secretary.

Defense lawyers said in filings that attempts to throw out the agreement is the latest in the government’s two decades of “fitful” and “negligent” mishandling of the case. They say the deal is already in effect and that Austin has no legal authority to throw it out after the fact.

The fight has put the Biden administration at odds with the U.S. military officials it appointed to oversee justice in the attacks.

The deal, negotiated over two years and approved by military prosecutors and the Pentagon’s senior official for Guantanamo in late July, stipulated life sentences without parole for Mohammed and two co-defendants. It also obligates them to answer any lingering questions that families of the victims have about the attacks.

Legal and logistical challenges have bogged down the 9/11 case in the 17 years since charges were filed against Mohammed. The case remains in pretrial hearings, with no trial date set.

The torture of Mohammed and other 9/11 defendants in CIA custody has posed one of the biggest obstacles, potentially rendering their later statements unusable in court.

With that in mind, military prosecutors notified families this summer that the senior Pentagon official overseeing Guantanamo had approved a plea deal. They called it “the best path to finality and justice.”

Austin unexpectedly announced Aug. 2 that he was scrapping the agreement. After the Guantanamo judge and a military review panel rejected Austin’s intervention, the Biden administration went to the District of Columbia federal appeals court this week.

Mohammed’s attorneys argued that Austin’s “extraordinary intervention in this case is solely a product of his lack of oversight over his own duly appointed delegate,” meaning the senior Pentagon official overseeing Guantanamo.

The Justice Department said that if the guilty pleas were accepted, the government would be denied a chance for a public trial and the opportunity to “seek capital punishment against three men charged with a heinous act of mass murder that caused the death of thousands of people and shocked the nation and the world.”

Peltz reported from New York. AP reporter Tara Copp contributed from Ramstein Air Base, Germany.

The transfer was the latest and biggest push by the Biden administration in its final weeks to clear Guantanamo of the last remaining detainees there who were never charged with a crime.

The latest release brings the total number of men detained at Guantanamo to 15. That’s the fewest since 2002, when President George W. Bush’s administration turned Guantanamo into a detention site for the mostly Muslim men taken into custody around the world in what the U.S. called its “war on terror.”

The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and military and covert operations elsewhere followed the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks.

The men in the latest transfer included Shaqawi al Hajj, who had undergone repeated hunger strikes and hospitalizations at Guantanamo to protest his 21 years in prison, preceded by two years of detention and torture in CIA custody, according to the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

Rights groups and some lawmakers have pushed successive U.S. administrations to close Guantanamo or, failing that, release all those detainees never charged with a crime. Guantanamo held about 800 detainees at its peak.

The Biden administration and administrations before it said they were working on lining up suitable countries willing to take those never-charged detainees. Many of those stuck at Guantanamo were from Yemen, a country split by war, with its capital held by the Iranian-allied Houthi militant group.

The sultanate of Oman, on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, did not acknowledge taking in the prisoners early Tuesday. Officials in the country did not respond to questions from The Associated Press. The key Western ally has taken in some 30 prisoners in the past since the founding of the prison.

However, those prisoners have since been released in circumstances unexplained by Oman. Two Afghans once held by Oman returned to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in February. One Yemeni died in Oman after being told he and 27 others would be repatriated to Yemen, the British activist group CAGE International said.

“Faced with little choice, 26 of the men and their families returned to Yemen after being pressured by the Omani government, which offered each $70,000 as compensation,” the group said. It wasn’t immediately clear what happened to the 28th prisoner.

The transfer announced Monday leaves six never-charged men still being held at Guantanamo, two convicted and sentenced inmates, and seven others charged with the 2001 attacks, the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, and 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia.

Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.

The decision puts back on track the agreements that would have the three men plead guilty to one of the deadliest attacks on the United States in exchange for being spared the possibility of the death penalty. The attacks by al-Qaida killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, and helped spur U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in what the George W. Bush administration called its war on terror.

The military appeals court released its ruling Monday night, according to the U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Military prosecutors and defense attorneys for Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks, and two co-defendants reached the plea agreements after two years of government-approved negotiations. The deals were announced late last summer.

Supporters of the plea agreements see them as a way of resolving the legally troubled case against the men at the U.S. military commission at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba. Pretrial hearings for Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi have been underway for more than a decade.

Much of the focus of pretrial arguments has been on how torture of the men while in CIA custody in the first years after their detention may taint the overall evidence in the case.

Within days of news of the plea deal this summer, Austin issued a brief order saying he was nullifying them.

He cited the gravity of the 9/11 attacks in saying that as defense secretary, he should decide on any plea agreements that would spare the defendants the possibility of execution.

Defense lawyers said Austin had no legal authority to reject a decision already approved by the Guantanamo court’s top authority and said the move amounted to unlawful interference in the case.

The military judge hearing the 9/11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, had agreed that Austin lacked standing to throw out the plea bargains after they were underway. That had set up the Defense Department’s appeal to the military appeals court.

Austin now has the option of taking his effort to throw out the plea deals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Separately, the Pentagon said it had repatriated one of the longest-held detainees at the Guantanamo military prison, a Tunisian man who U.S. authorities approved for transfer more than a decade ago.

Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi’s return to Tunisia leaves 26 men at Guantanamo. That’s down from a peak population of about 700 Muslim men detained abroad and brought to the prison in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Al-Yazidi’s repatriation leaves 14 men awaiting transfer to other countries after U.S. authorities waived any prosecution and cleared them as security risks.

The Biden administration, pressed by rights groups to free remaining Guantanamo detainees held without charge, transferred out three other men this month. The U.S. says it is searching for suitable and stable countries willing to receive the remaining 14.

In a statement, the U.S. military said it had worked with authorities in Tunisia for the “responsible transfer” of al-Yazidi. He had been a prisoner at Guantanamo since 2002, when the U.S. began sending Muslim detainees taken abroad there.

Al-Yazidi is the last of a dozen Tunisian men once held at Guantanamo.

Of those remaining at Guantanamo, seven — including Mohammed and his 9/11 co-defendants — face active cases. Two others of the 26 total have been convicted and sentenced by the military commission.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity Wednesday because the order by the judge, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, has not yet been posted publicly or officially announced.

Unless government prosecutors or others attempt to challenge the plea deals again, McCall’s ruling means that the three 9/11 defendants before long could enter guilty pleas in the U.S. military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, taking a dramatic step toward wrapping up the long-running and legally troubled government prosecution in one of the deadliest attacks on the United States.

The plea agreements would spare Mohammed and two co-defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the risk of the death penalty in exchange for the guilty pleas.

Government prosecutors had negotiated the deals with defense attorneys under government auspices, and the top official for the military commission at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base had approved the agreements.

The plea deals in the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people spurred immediate political blowback by Republican lawmakers and others after they were made public this summer.

Within days, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a brief order saying he was nullifying them. Plea bargains in possible death penalty cases tied to one of the gravest crimes ever carried out on U.S. soil were a momentous step that should only be decided by the defense secretary, Austin said at the time.

The agreements, and Austin’s attempt to reverse them, have made for one of the most fraught episodes in a U.S. prosecution marked by delays and legal difficulties. That includes years of ongoing pretrial hearings to determine the admissibility of statements by the defendants given their years of torture in CIA custody.

The Pentagon is reviewing the judge’s decision and had no immediate further comment, said Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary.

Lawdragon, a legal news site that long has covered the courtroom proceedings from Guantanamo, and The New York Times first reported the ruling.

Military officials have yet to post the judge’s decision on the Guantanamo military commission’s online site. But Lawdragon said McCall’s 29-page ruling concludes that Austin lacked the legal authority to toss out the plea deals, and acted too late, after Guantanamo’s top official already had approved the deals.

Abiding by Austin’s order would give defense secretaries “absolute veto power” over any act they disagree with, which would be contrary to the independence of the presiding official over the Guantanamo trials, the law blog quotes McCall as saying in the ruling.

While families of some of the victims and others are adamant that the 9/11 prosecutions continue until trial and possible death sentences, legal experts say it’s not clear that could ever happen. If the 9/11 cases ever clear the hurdles of trial, verdicts and sentencings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit would likely hear many of the issues in the course of any death penalty appeals.

The issues include the CIA destruction of videos of interrogations, whether Austin’s plea deal reversal constituted unlawful interference and whether the torture of the men tainted subsequent interrogations by “clean teams” of FBI agents that did not involve violence.

AP writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

Biden announced plans to use the temporary pier in his State of the Union address in March to hasten the delivery of aid to the Palestinian territory besieged by war between Israel and Hamas.

But the $230 million military-run project known as the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, or JLOTS, would only operate for about 20 days. Aid groups pulled out of the project by July, ending a mission plagued by repeated weather and security problems that limited how much food and other emergency supplies could get to starving Palestinians.

“Multiple USAID staff expressed concerns that the focus on using JLOTS would detract from the Agency’s advocacy for opening land crossings, which were seen as more efficient and proven methods of transporting aid into Gaza,” the inspector general said in a report published Tuesday. “However, once the President issued the directive, the Agency’s focus was to use JLOTS as effectively as possible.”

At the time Biden announced plans for the floating pier, the United Nations was reporting that virtually all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people were struggling to find food and more than a half-million were facing starvation.

The Biden administration set a goal of the U.S. sea route and pier providing food to feed 1.5 million of Gaza’s people for 90 days. It fell short, bringing in enough to feed about 450,000 people for a month before shutting down.

High waves and bad weather repeatedly damaged the pier, and the U.N. World Food Program ended cooperation with the project after an Israeli rescue operation used an area nearby to whisk away hostages, raising concerns about whether its workers would be seen as neutral and independent in the conflict.

National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said the project “had a real impact” of getting food to hungry Palestinian civilians despite the obstacles.

“The bottom line is that given how dire the humanitarian situation in Gaza is, the United States has left no stone unturned in our efforts to get more aid in, and the pier played a key role at a critical time in advancing that goal,” Savett said in a statement Tuesday.

The Defense Department said the pier “achieved its goal of providing an additive means of delivering high volumes of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza to help address the acute humanitarian crisis.”

The U.S. military knew from the outset “there would be challenges as part of this in this complex emergency,” the department’s statement added. Its inspector general also is conducting an evaluation.

The USAID watchdog’s report alleged that the United States had failed to honor commitments it had made with the World Food Program to get the U.N. agency to agree to take part in distributing supplies from the pier into Palestinian hands.

The U.S. agreed to conditions set by the program, including that the pier would be placed in north Gaza, where the need for aid was greatest, and that a U.N. member nation would provide security for the pier. That step was meant to safeguard the program’s neutrality among Gaza’s warring parties, the watchdog report said.

Instead, however, the Pentagon placed the pier in central Gaza. Food program staffers told the USAID watchdog that it was their understanding the U.S. military chose that location because it allowed better security for the pier and the military itself.

Israel’s military ultimately provided the security after the U.S. military was unable to find a neutral country willing to do the job, the watchdog report said.

A U.S. official said the USAID staffer concerns about the project undercutting overall aid efforts were raised early in the process. USAID responded by adding enough staffing for the agency to address both the pier and the land routes simultaneously, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

USAID said in a statement that U.S. agencies worked together in planning the project and in consultation with the United Nations and humanitarian groups to “mitigate risks to all personnel, including humanitarian staff.”

Inspectors general are meant to be watchdogs for the government and individual agencies, providing accountability and transparency on their operations.

Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Tara Copp contributed to this report.

“This wasn’t a decision that I took lightly,” Austin told reporters at an event with Australian officials in Annapolis, Maryland.

“But I have long believed that the families of the victims, our service members, and the American public deserve the opportunity to see military commissions, commission trials carried out” in the 9/11 case, he said.

At the U.S. military commission in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, meanwhile, lawyers and the judge in the case of accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and two other defendants who had also taken plea deals were still coming to terms with Austin’s surprise order and its effect on efforts to resolve the more than 20-year-old case.

Mohammed and a total of four other defendants at Guantanamo are accused in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, using hijacked passenger jets, that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. A fourth defendant did not agree to the plea agreement, and a fifth defendant last year was ruled mentally unfit to continue facing trial.

Legal complications, including profound questions over how much the men’s torture while in CIA custody in the first years after their capture has tainted the evidence and the case itself, have helped drag out proceedings. The case remains in pretrial hearings after more than a decade.

After about two years of plea negotiations, the Pentagon-appointed retired general overseeing the military commission last week approved a plea bargain struck by prosecutors and defense attorneys that would have spared Mohammed and the two others the risk of the death penalty, in return for their guilty pleas.

Families of 9/11 victims offered differing opinions, with some welcoming the resolution and others saying they wanted to see capital trials. Senior Republicans in Congress publicly lambasted the Biden administration for the plea bargain.

An order from Austin made public late Friday, in which he said he was revoking approval of the plea bargain and personally assuming that decision-making authority in the 9/11 case, upended the deal.

“There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think of 9/11 and the Americans that were murdered that day. Also those who died trying to save lives, and the troops and their families who gave so much for this country,” said Austin, who commanded troops in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and was awarded a Silver Star for his service as a commander during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Some of the lawyers and civil-rights organizations involved in the Guantanamo Bay cases accuse Austin of bowing to political pressure in overturning the plea deal, and are challenging the legality of Austin’s action.

Open hearings are scheduled to resume Wednesday for the first time since Austin’s order, and may reveal the defense’s response to the overriding of the plea bargain.

But that may not be enough for the U.S. to avoid retaliation targeting its forces in the region. A top U.S. commander warned on Wednesday of danger to American troops.

And if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent broadening of targeted strikes on adversaries around the region — to include Iranian security operatives and leaders — deepens regional hostilities, analysts say, it’s not clear the United States can avoid being pulled into deeper regional conflict as well.

The Biden administration insists it had no advance knowledge of the airstrike Monday. But the United States is closely tied to Israel’s military regardless. The U.S. remains Israel’s indispensable ally and unstinting supplier of weapons, responsible for some 70% of Israeli weapon imports and an estimated 15% of Israel’s defense budget. That includes providing the kind of advanced aircraft and munitions that appear to have been employed in the attack.

Israel hasn’t acknowledged a role in the airstrike, but Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Tuesday that the U.S. has assessed Israel was responsible.

Multiple arms of Iran’s government served notice that they would hold the United States accountable for the fiery attack. The strike, in the Syrian capital of Damascus, killed senior commanders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for Syria and Lebanon, an officer of the powerful Iran-allied Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, and others.

American forces in Syria and Iraq already are frequent targets when Iran and its regional allies seek retaliation for strikes by Israelis, notes Charles Lister, the Syria program director for the Middle East Institute.

“What the Iranians have always done for years when they have felt most aggressively targeted by Israel is not to hit back at Israelis, but Americans,” seeing them as soft targets in the region, Lister said.

On Wednesday in Washington, the top U.S. Air Force commander for the Middle East, Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, said Iran’s assertion that the U.S. bears responsibility for Israeli actions could bring an end to a pause in militia attacks on U.S. forces that has lasted since early February.

He said he sees no specific threat to U.S. troops right now, but “I am concerned because of the Iranian rhetoric talking about the U.S., that there could be a risk to our forces.”

U.S. officials have recorded more than 150 attacks by Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria on U.S. forces at bases in those countries since war between Hamas and Israel began on Oct. 7.

One, in late January, killed three U.S. service members and injured dozens more at a base in Jordan.

In retaliation, the U.S. launched a massive air assault, hitting more than 85 targets at seven locations in Iraq and Syria, including command and control headquarters, drone and ammunition storage sites and other facilities connected to the militias or the IRGC’s Quds Force, the Guard’s expeditionary unit that handles Tehran’s relationship with and arming of regional militias. There have been no publicly reported attacks on U.S. troops in the region since that response.

Grynkewich told reporters the U.S. is watching and listening carefully to what Iran is saying and doing to evaluate how Tehran might respond.

Analysts and diplomats cite a range of ways Iran could retaliate.

Since Oct. 7, Iran and the regional militias allied to it in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen have followed a strategy of calibrated attacks that stop short of triggering an all-out conflict that could subject Iran’s homeland forces or Hezbollah to full-blown war with Israel or the United States.

Beyond strikes on U.S. troops, possibilities for Iranian retaliation could include a limited missile strike directly from Iranian soil to Israel, Lister said. That would reciprocate for Israel’s strike on what under international law was sovereign Iranian soil, at the Iranian diplomatic building in Damascus.

A concentrated attack on a U.S. position abroad on the scale of the 1983 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut is possible, but seems unlikely given the scale of U.S. retaliation that would draw, analysts say. Iran also could escalate an existing effort to kill Trump-era officials behind the United States’ 2020 drone killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.

How far any other retaliation and potential escalation goes may depend on two things out of U.S. control: Whether Iran wants to keep regional hostilities at their current level or escalate, and whether Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s far-right government does.

Sina Toossi, a fellow at the Center for International Policy, said analysts in Iran are among those trying to read Netanyahu’s mind since the attack, struggling to choose between two competing narratives for Israel’s objective.

“One perceives Israel’s actions as a deliberate provocation of war that Iran should respond to with restraint,” Toossi wrote in the U.S.-based think tank’s journal. “The other suggests that Israel is capitalizing on Iran’s typically restrained responses,” and that failing to respond in kind will only embolden Israel.

Ultimately, Iran’s sense that it is already winning its strategic goals as the Hamas-Israel war continues — elevating the Palestinian cause and costing Israel friends globally — may go the furthest in persuading Iranian leaders not to risk open warfare with Israel or U.S. in whatever response they make to Monday’s airstrike, some analysts and diplomats say.

Shira Efron, a director of policy research at the U.S.-based Israel Policy Forum, rejected suggestions that Netanyahu was actively trying with attacks, like the one in Damascus, to draw the U.S. into a potentially decisive conflict alongside Israel against their common rivals, at least for now.

“First, the risk of escalation has increased. No doubt,” Efron said.

“I don’t think Netanyahu is interested in full-blown war though,” she said. “And whereas in the past Israel was thought to be interested in drawing the U.S. into a greater conflict, even if the desire still exists in some circles, it is not more than wishful thinking at the moment.”

U.S. President Joe Biden is facing pressure from the other direction.

So far he’s resisting calls from growing numbers of Democratic lawmakers and voters to limit the flow of American arms to Israel as a way to press Netanyahu to ease Israeli military killing of civilians in Gaza and to heed other U.S. appeals.

As criticism has grown of U.S. military support of Israel’s war in Gaza, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller has increasingly pointed to Israel’s longer-term need for weapons — to defend itself against Iran and Iranian-allied Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The U.S. is ″always concerned about anything that would be escalatory,” Miller said after the attack in Damascus. “It has been one of the goals of this administration since October 7th to keep the conflict from spreading, recognizing that Israel has the right to defend itself from adversaries that are sworn to its destruction.”

Israel for years has hit at Iranian proxies and their sites in the region, knocking back their ability to build strength and cause trouble for Israelis.

Since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, one of a network of Iran-aligned militias in the region, that shattered Israel’s sense of security, Netanyahu’s government has increasingly added Iranian security operatives and leaders to target lists in the region, Lister notes.

The U.S. military already has deepened engagement from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea since the Hamas-Israel war opened — deploying aircraft carriers to the region to discourage rear-guard attacks against Israel, opening airstrikes to quell attacks on shipping by Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen.

It is also moving to build a pier off Gaza to try to get more aid to Palestinian civilians despite obstacles that include Israel’s restrictions and attacks on aid deliveries.

It is the only known operation of its kind to extract American citizens and their close family members during the months of devastating ground fighting and Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. The vast majority of people who have made it out of northern and central Gaza through the Rafah crossing into Egypt fled south in the initial weeks of the war. An escape from the heart of the Palestinian territory through intense combat has become far more perilous and difficult since.

Zahra Sckak, 44, made it out of Gaza on New Year’s Eve, along with her brother-in-law, Farid Sukaik, an American citizen, a U.S. official told The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to confirm the rescue, which had been kept quiet for security reasons.

Sckak’s husband, Abedalla Sckak, was shot earlier in the Israel-Hamas war as the family fled from a building hit by an airstrike. He died days later. One of her three American sons, Spc. Ragi A. Sckak, 24, serves as an infantryman in the U.S. military.

The extraction involved the Israeli military and local Israeli officials who oversee Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the U.S. official said. There was no indication that American officials were on the ground in Gaza.

“The United States played solely a liaison and coordinating role between the Sckak family and the governments of Israel and Egypt,” the official said.

A family member and U.S.-based lawyers and advocates working on the family’s behalf had described Sckak and Sukaik as pinned down in a building surrounded by combatants, with little or no food and with only water from sewers to drink.

There were few immediate details of the on-the-ground operation. It took place after extended appeals from Sckak’s family and U.S.-based citizens groups for help from Congress members and the Biden administration.

The State Department has said some 300 American citizens, legal permanent residents and their immediate family members remain in Gaza, at risk from ground fighting, airstrikes and widening starvation and thirst in the besieged territory.

With no known official U.S. presence on the ground, those still left in the territory face a dangerous and sometimes impossible trip to Egypt’s border crossing out of Gaza, and a bureaucratic struggle for U.S., Egyptian and Israeli approval to get themselves, their parents and young children out of Gaza.

Associated Press writer Tara Copp contributed to this report.

That planning includes looking for U.S.-allied nations in the Saharan and Sahel regions, some of the world’s most active areas for al-Qaida- and Islamic State-allied extremist groups, “that we could maybe partner up with, and then move our assets there,” Air Force Gen. James Hecker told reporters in Washington.

Hecker stressed that there had been no decision from the Biden administration regarding whether the Niger military’s July 26 overthrow of the country’s democratically elected president would compel U.S. diplomats or security forces to leave the country.

U.S. bases there have been vital counter-terror posts in an unstable region that is seeing an increasing number of coups as well as encroachment by Russia’s Wagner mercenary group. The U.S. presence includes Air Base 101 in Niamey, the capital, and Air Base 201 in the remote city of Agadez on the southern edge of the Sahara.

If U.S. forces do leave, either following a decision by the Biden administration that it cannot work with the mutinous soldiers now leading the country or because the junta orders them out, “it obviously will have an effect” on U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism efforts, Hecker said.

“But of course what we hope for is that we have a peaceful diplomatic solution to this and we don’t have to” leave, he said.

The head of Niger’s presidential guard instigated the coup, and continues to confine President Mohamed Bazoum and his family in the presidential palace. U.S. diplomats say junta leaders have warned that Bazoum would be killed if Niger’s West African neighbors intervene militarily to restore Bazoum to power. Bazoum took office in 2021, in the coup-prone country’s first peaceful and democratic transfer of power since independence from France in 1960.

The U.S. has yet to formally call what happened in Niger a coup. That designation could compel Washington to cut many of the military and security ties between the two countries.

Hecker said he believed it would be “weeks or much longer” before U.S. officials would announce any kind of decision to evacuate, if it does come to that.

Niger had been one of a dwindling number of countries in West Africa’s Sahara and Sahel regions neither ruled by a military-backed government nor aligned with Russian mercenaries.

Hecker gave no details on what countries the U.S. was considering as an alternate West Africa counter-terror post, if Niger became unworkable.

“We’ve just started looking at that,” he said. American military officials “know where we would like the base to be, but more of that’s going to be diplomatic” in terms of how it’s decided.

The precautionary planning for evacuation, Hecker said, included scenarios where the Americans are able to move out at leisure and also where they have to depart in a hurry, taking only the most sensitive materiel.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s administration has decided to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine and is expected to announce on Friday that the Pentagon will send thousands of them as part of a new military aid package worth up to $800 million for the war effort against Russia, according to people familiar with the decision.

The decision comes despite widespread concerns that the bombs can cause civilian casualties and sparked a call from the United Nations to both Russia and Ukraine to avoid using them. The Pentagon will provide munitions that have a reduced “dud rate,” meaning there will be far fewer unexploded rounds that can result in unintended civilian deaths.

U.S. officials said Thursday they expect the military aid to Ukraine will be announced on Friday. The weapons will come from Pentagon stocks and will also include Bradley and Stryker armored vehicles and an array of ammunition, such as rounds for howitzers and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, officials said.

Long sought by Ukraine, cluster bombs are weapons that open in the air, releasing submunitions, or bomblets, that are dispersed over a large area and are intended to wreak destruction on multiple targets at once.

The officials and others familiar with the decision were not authorized to publicly discuss the move before the official announcement and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

Ukrainian officials have asked for the weapons to aid their campaign to push through lines of Russian troops and make gains in the ongoing counteroffensive. Russian forces are already using cluster munitions on the battlefield and in populated civilian areas, U.S. officials have said.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, some cluster munitions leave behind bomblets’ that have a high rate of failure to explode — up to 40% in some cases. U.S. officials said Thursday that the rate of unexploded ordnance for the munitions that will be going to Ukraine is less than 3% and therefore will mean fewer threats left behind to civilians.

At a Pentagon briefing Thursday, Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said he had no announcement to make about cluster munitions. He said the Defense Department has “multiple variants” of the munitions and “the ones that we are considering providing would not include older variants with (unexploding) rates that are higher than 2.35%.”

Ryder would not say whether Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has reached out to NATO counterparts to address some of their concerns on the use of cluster munitions. Ryder said the U.S. is aware of reports that indicate some munitions have higher unexploding rates.

If the decision was made to provide the munitions to Ukraine, he said the U.S. “would be carefully selecting rounds with lower dud rates, for which we have recent testing data.”

Asked how the cluster munitions, if approved, would help Ukraine, Ryder said they can be loaded with charges that can penetrate armor and fragment so they can hit multiple personnel — “a capability that would be useful in any type of offensive operations.” Ryder said the Russians have been using cluster munitions that have a very high dud rate.

Oleksandra Ustinova, a member of Ukraine’s parliament who has been advocating that Washington send more weapons, noted that Ukrainian forces have had to disable mines from much of the territory they are winning back from Russia. As part of that process, Ukrainians will also be able to catch any unexploded ordnance from cluster munitions.

“We will have to de-mine anyway, but it’s better to have this capability,” Ustinova said.

She credited Congress for pushing the Democratic president’s administration over several months to change its position on the munitions.

Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the move was long overdue.

“Now is the time for the U.S. and its allies to provide Ukraine with the systems it needs from cluster munitions to F-16s to ATACMS in order to aid their critical counteroffensive. Any further delay will cost the lives of countless Ukrainians and prolong this brutal war,” said McCaul, R-Texas.

The Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS, would give Ukraine the ability to strike Russian targets from as far as about 180 miles (300 kilometers).

Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that the U.S. has been thinking about providing the cluster munitions “for a long time.”

“The Ukrainians have asked for it, other European countries have provided some of that, the Russians are using it,” Milley said during a speech at the National Press Club.

Cluster bombs can be fired by artillery that the U.S. has provided to Ukraine, and the Pentagon has a large stockpile of them.

The last large-scale American use of cluster bombs was during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, according to the Pentagon. But U.S. forces considered them a key weapon during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, according to Human Rights Watch. In the first three years of that conflict, it is estimated the U.S.-led coalition dropped more than 1,500 cluster bombs in Afghanistan.

Proponents of banning cluster bombs say they kill indiscriminately and endanger civilians long after their use. Groups have raised alarms about Russia’s use of the munitions in Ukraine.

A convention banning the use of cluster bombs has been joined by more than 120 countries who agreed not to use, produce, transfer or stockpile the weapons and to clear them after they’ve been used.

The United States, Russia and Ukraine are among the countries that have not signed on.

Marta Hurtado, a spokesperson for the U.N. human rights office, said Friday that “the use of such munitions should stop immediately and not be used in any place.”

“We will urge the Russian Federation and Ukraine to join the more than 100 states that have ratified the convention of cluster munitions and that effectively ban their use,” she added.

It is unclear how America’s NATO allies would view the U.S. providing cluster bombs to Ukraine and whether the issue might prove divisive for their largely united support of Kyiv. More than two-thirds of the 30 countries in the alliance are signatories of the 2010 convention on cluster munitions.

Germany made clear on Friday that it won’t be providing any cluster ammunition to Ukraine, as it joined an international treaty prohibiting the weapons more than a decade ago, but it expressed understanding for the American position.

“We’re certain that our U.S. friends didn’t take the decision about supplying such ammunition lightly,” German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit told reporters in Berlin. “We need to remember once again that Russia has already used cluster ammunition at a large scale in its illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.”

Laura Cooper, a deputy assistant secretary of defense focusing on Russia and Ukraine, recently testified to Congress that the Pentagon has assessed that such munitions would help Kyiv press through Russia’s dug-in positions.

____ AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee and Associated Press writers Geir Moulson, Tara Copp, Zeke Miller and Frank Jordans contributed to this report.