“Our Boys” is a deceptively innocuous title for a powerfully unsettling story.

A coproduction of HBO and Keshet Studios , the 10-part series, debuting Aug. 12, dramatizes the aftermath of the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teenagers by Hamas militants in Israel during the summer of 2014. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager, Muhammad Abu Khdeir , was burned to death and found in a forest outside Jerusalem. The series uses the trappings of a police procedural to tell a politically and emotionally sensitive story, which splits its point of view between Muhammad ( Ram Masarweh ) and his Palestinian family, and the investigator Simon ( Shlomi Elkabetz ), who works the case for the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency.

Three creators from disparate backgrounds joined forces to bring “Our Boys” to the screen: Hagai Levi , the Israeli co-creator of Showtime’s “The Affair”; Tawfik Abu Wael , a Palestinian filmmaker (“Last Days in Jerusalem”); and Joseph Cedar , a New York City-born, Israel-raised writer and director (“Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer”).

Although the series is about real-life events within a specific time and place, its exploration of how hate crimes shatter and reverberate throughout a society is depressingly universal.

“ When I heard about the El Paso shootings, I thought, this is so close to what we are doing here,” Levi said. “ It’s not really about Israel only.”