ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — There will be a new burled arch over the finish line to welcome mushers in next year’s Iditarod, a race official said days after the current arch crumbled into a wood pile.
That arch, which has been used since the 2000 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, collapsed in Nome on Saturday, likely from wood rot after being exposed to the salt water and cold air blowing off the Bering Strait into the western Alaska coastal community.
“The need for a new arch has been on our radar,” race spokesperson Shannon Noonan said in an email to The Associated Press on Tuesday.
“Race Director Mark Nordman has been working with Nome Mayor John Handeland on the commission of the reconstruction of the new arch to ensure we have a new arch for Iditarod 2025,” she said.
The arch wasn’t always over the finish line, which had an inauspicious beginning. According to the Iditarod website, legend has it someone sprinkled Kool-Aid crystals across the ice for a finish line for the very first race in 1973. A year later, two men each held a paper plate with the words “The” on one and “End” on the other.
Musher Red “Fox” Olson felt the finish line needed something more permanent and spent about 500 hours constructing the arch that weighed 5,000 pounds. It was in place for the 1975 race.
Olson’s original arch was damaged in 1999 when it was being moved off Front Street, where the finish line lies a half block from the sea, after the race.
A new arch was built in time for the 2000 race, but weather took its toll over the years on it, as well. It required major work in 2013.
Noonan said the replacement arch used the posts from the original 1975 sign to keep it aloft. It’s not know what the condition of the support posts were after the collapse, and social media photos show one on the ground and the other still standing.
Handeland gathered pieces of the sign to safekeeping and encouraged people to return any wood pieces they might have taken as souvenirs.
The city plans to hang the second arch below the original in the city’s recreation center. Meanwhile, a city post on social media says people are out scouting for the perfect tree to be the third burled arch.
The Iditarod, the world’s most famous sled dog race, begins with a ceremonial start in Anchorage the first Saturday in March. The official start is the following day just north in the community of Willow, and the winner of the 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) race reaches Nome about nine days later.
Musher Dallas Seavey won this year’s race, his record-breaking sixth victory. The race was marked by the deaths of three dogs during the competition.
FILE - Tourists pose under the famed burled arch, which serves as the finish line in the nearly thousand-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Nome, Alaska, on Friday, March 7, 2014. Nome Mayor John Handeland said the arch collapsed Saturday, April 27, 2024, likely from wood rot. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)
FILE - In this March 16, 2015, volunteers help raise the Iditarod finishers banner at the burled arch finish line in Nome, Alaska. Nome Mayor John Handeland said the arch collapsed Saturday, April 27, 2024, likely from wood rot. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen, File)
CAIRO (AP) — The United Nations says it has suspended food distribution in the southern Gaza city of Rafah due to lack of supplies and insecurity. It also said no aid trucks entered via a pier set up by the U.S. for sea deliveries for the past two days.
The U.N. has not specified how many people remain in Rafah after the Israeli military launched an intensified assault there on May 6, but there appears to be several hundred thousand.
Abeer Etefa, a spokesperson for the U.N’s World Food Program, warned that “humanitarian operations in Gaza are near collapse.” If food and other supplies don’t resume entering Gaza in “in massive quantities, famine-like conditions will spread,” she said
The main agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, on Tuesday announced the suspension of distribution in Rafah in a post on X, without elaborating.
Etefeh said the WFP had also stopped distribution in Rafah after exhausting its stocks. It continued “limited distributions” of reduced food parcels in central Gaza but “food parcel stocks will run out within days,” she said.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel sought Tuesday to contain the fallout from a request by the chief prosecutor of the world’s top war crimes court for arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders, a move supported by three European countries, including key ally France.
Belgium, Slovenia and France each said Monday they backed the decision by International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan, who accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his defense minister and three Hamas leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip and Israel.
While no one faces imminent arrest, the announcement deepens Israel's global isolation at a time when it is facing growing criticism from even its closest allies over the war in Gaza. Support for the warrants from three European Union countries also exposes divisions in the West's approach to Israel.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz headed to France on Tuesday in response, and his meetings there could set the tone for how countries navigate the warrants — if they are eventually issued — and whether they could pose a threat to Israeli leaders.
Israel still has the support of its top ally, the United States, as well as other Western countries that spoke out against the decision. But if the warrants are issued, they could complicate international travel for Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, even if they do not face any immediate risk of prosecution because Israel itself is not a member of the court.
The prosecutor also requested warrants for Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh. Hamas is already considered an international terrorist group by the West. Both Sinwar and Deif are believed to be hiding in Gaza. But Haniyeh, the supreme leader of the Islamic militant group, is based in Qatar and frequently travels across the region. Qatar, like Israel, is not a member of the ICC.
As Israeli leaders came to grips with the prosecutor's decision, violence continued in the region, with an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank killing at least seven Palestinians, including a local doctor, according to Palestinian health officials.
In a statement Monday night about the warrant requests, France said it “supports the International Criminal Court, its independence, and the fight against impunity in all situations.”
“France has been warning for many months about the imperative of strict compliance with international humanitarian law and in particular about the unacceptable nature of civilian losses in the Gaza Strip and insufficient humanitarian access,” said the statement from France, which has a large Jewish community and close trade and diplomatic ties with Israel.
The war between began on Oct. 7, when Hamas-led militants crossed into Israel and killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 250 hostage. Khan accused Hamas’ leaders of crimes against humanity, including extermination, murder and sexual violence.
Israel responded with an offensive, which has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between noncombatants and fighters in its count. The war has sparked a humanitarian crisis that has displaced much of the coastal enclave’s population and driven parts of it to starvation, which Khan said Israel used as a “method of warfare.”
Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib said Monday in a post on social media platform X that “crimes committed in Gaza must be prosecuted at the highest level, regardless of the perpetrators.”
Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders condemned the prosecutor's move as disgraceful and antisemitic. U.S. President Joe Biden also lambasted the prosecutor and supported Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas. The United Kingdom called the move “not helpful,” saying the ICC does not have jurisdiction in the case, while Israeli ally Czech Republic called Khan's decision “appalling and completely unacceptable.”
A panel of three judges will decide whether to issue the arrest warrants and allow a case to proceed. The judges typically take two months to make such decisions.
Experts warned that any warrants could complicate relations between Israel and even allies that condemned the move.
Yuval Kaplinsky, a former senior official in Israel’s Justice Ministry, said countries that are party to the court would be obliged to arrest Netanyahu or Gallant if they visit, although he said some of those countries might find legal loopholes that could help them avoid that.
“They would prefer (that) Netanyahu does not visit rather than have him visit in London and have the entire world watch him avoid extradition,” Kaplinsky said.
Since the war began, violence has also flared in the occupied West Bank.
On Tuesday, an Israeli raid into the Jenin refugee camp and the adjacent city of Jenin killed at least seven Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
The military said its forces struck militants during the operation while the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group said its fighters battled the Israeli forces.
However, according to Wissam Abu Baker, the director of Jenin Governmental Hospital, the medical center’s surgery specialist, Ossayed Kamal Jabareen, was among the dead. He was killed on his way to work, Abu Baker said.
Jenin and the refugee camp, seen as a hotbed of militancy, have been frequent targets of Israeli raids, long before Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza broke out.
Since the start of the war, nearly 500 Palestinians have been killed in West Bank fighting, many of them militants, as well as others throwing stones or explosives at troops. Others not involved in the confrontations have also been killed.
Israel says it is cracking down on soaring militancy in the territory, pointing to a spike in attacks by Palestinians on Israelis. It has arrested more than 3,000 Palestinians since the start of the war in Gaza.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war, along with east Jerusalem, which it later annexed, and the Gaza Strip, which it withdrew troops and settlers from in 2005. Palestinians seek those territories as part of their future independent state, hopes for which have been dimmed since the war in Gaza erupted.
Goldenberg reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press journalists Majdi Mohammed in the Jenin refugee camp, West Bank, Jack Jeffery in Jerusalem, John Leicester in Paris, and Jill Lawless in London contributed to this report.
FILE - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel on Oct. 28, 2023. Top Israeli officials are accused of seven war crimes and crimes against humanity by the ICC. (Abir Sultan/Pool Photo via AP, File)
FILE - Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, speaks to journalists after his meeting with Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, in Beirut, Lebanon, on June 28, 2021. The Hamas officials are accused by the ICC of planning and instigating eight war crimes and crimes against humanity, among them extermination, murder, taking hostages, rape and torture. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File)
Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel Tuesday, May 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
FILE - Exterior view of the International Criminal Court, or ICC, in The Hague, Netherlands, Tuesday, April 30, 2024. The International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor said Monday, May 20, 2024, that he’s seeking arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders in connection with their actions during the seven-month war. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File)
Smoke rises to the sky after explosion in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel Tuesday, May 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
