The United States will later Thursday mark the 24th anniversary of the 911 terrorist attacks on New York City, Washington D.C. and Shanksville, Pennsylvania that occurred on September 11, 2001.

President Donald Trump is expected to attend a memorial event at the Pentagon in the nation’s capital before later traveling to the Big Apple to take in a Yankees baseball game with the families of fallen first responders.

Nearly 3 000 people died on that fateful day, almost a quarter of a century ago, when hijackers crashed jetliners into the World Trade Centre Towers in downtown Manhattan, the Pentagon near Washington D.C. and a field in Pennsylvania.

Family members of the victims will gather for the annual reading of the names in New York at Memorial Plaza during a ceremony that will observe six moments of silence marking when he Tower was struck and later fell and the times of the attack on the Pentagon and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville – a day that forever changed a country and reshaped its foreign policy, birthing the phrase ‘the war on terror’.

The bell of hope is scheduled to ring out at St. Paul’s chapel in New York as well to mark the moment at 08:46 a.m. local time (1246 GMT) when the first of two planes hit the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Pentagon staff in Washington, D.C. attended an observance ceremony one day before 9/11 on Wednesday.

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the suicide attacks 24 years ago, which led to a US-led war in Afghanistan. -Additional reporting by Reuters