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A rapidly moving wildfire has engulfed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge in Arizona in the United States.

The fire forced officials to close access to the Grand Canyon’s North Rim on Sunday, and residents and tourists were evacuated.

Here is what happened to the Grand Canyon Lodge and what is the latest:

What happened to the Grand Canyon Lodge?

Two wildfires, the White Sage Fire and the Dragon Bravo Fire, are currently burning at or near the Grand Canyon’s North Rim.

The Dragon Bravo Fire is the one that burned the Grand Canyon Lodge and nearby structures.

It was sparked by lightning on July 4 and expanded to 200 hectares (500 acres) in a little more than a week, according to the National Park Service (NPS).

Dragon Bravo was driven by sustained winds of 32 kilometres per hour (20 miles per hour) and gusts as strong as 64km/h (40mph).

The White Sage Fire was also started by lightning on July 9. By July 13, it had spread to 40,186 acres (16,263 hectares), according to the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service.

The NPS said no casualties have been reported and residents and tourists were safely evacuated.

What is the lodge known for?

The Grand Canyon Lodge was a seasonal hotel on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon National Park in Coconino County in northern Arizona.

The lodge had stood on a North Rim elevation since 1928 and was designed by architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood.

The original lodge burned down in a kitchen fire in 1932 and was rebuilt in 1937, based on the original plan and stonework.

However, it was scaled back and built without a second storey.

The main lodge and its 120 cabins were open seasonally. This year, the lodge opened on May 15 and was to have stayed open until October 15.

It has drawn people for decades with its breathtaking views of one of the natural wonders of the US.

What is the Grand Canyon?

The Grand Canyon was carved by the Colorado River and is about 446km (277 miles) long, up to 29km (18 miles) wide and more than 1.6km (1 mile) deep in spots.

The canyon exposes layers of red sandstone and multicoloured bands of other rock, revealing almost 2 billion years of Earth’s geological history.

The Grand Canyon is one of the most visited US national parks with millions of visitors a year and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The NPS said that according to preliminary assessments, 50 to 80 structures have been lost in the wildfires, including NPS administrative buildings and visitor facilities.

What rescue efforts are in place?

The Grand Canyon National Park was evacuated on Thursday because of the wildfire and will remain closed for the rest of the season.

Five hundred personnel have been assigned to fight the White Sage Fire, according to the Forest Service.

On July 9, an update published on the Grand Canyon National Park’s Facebook page said authorities were using a “confine/contain” strategy to manage the Dragon Bravo Fire.

“This means the fire is being allowed to fulfil its natural role within a defined area, while firefighters take action to limit its spread where necessary,” the post said, adding that the fire did not pose threats to infrastructure or public safety at the time.

On Thursday, the park said the Dragon Bravo Fire was being managed with a “full suppression” strategy and by Friday, it posted another update on Facebook saying: “The fire is being managed with an aggressive full suppression strategy.”

Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, thanked firefighters and first responders working to manage the fire while questioning the Republican-led federal government’s response.

“They must first take aggressive action to end the wildfire and prevent further damage,” Hobbs wrote in a post on X on Sunday.

She said in another post: “An incident of this magnitude demands intense oversight and scrutiny into the federal government’s emergency response.”

I am incredibly saddened by the destruction of the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, and my heart goes out to every person impacted by the Dragon Bravo Fire near the Grand Canyon’s North Rim.

Thank you to every firefighter and first responder taking action to combat the flames.

What’s the latest on the ground?

The fires are still burning.

While firefighting efforts are ongoing, authorities said they have been hindered by hot, dry winds.

“Crews encountered very extreme fire behavior due to the dry conditions [and] gusty and erratic winds inhibiting the ability for fire fighters to safely engage the fire,” the Bureau of Land Management said about the White Sage Fire.

The Forest Service also reported record-high energy release components (ERCs), which is a measure of how dry and flammable vegetation is,. This combination of factors is creating a volatile environment.

The Dragon Bravo Fire is also posing challenges to firefighters.

The NPS reported that aerial fire retardant was being deployed to slow the fire near the lodge, but a chlorine gas leak at the North Rim water treatment facility prompted the evacuation of firefighters from key areas nearby, halting operations.

The gas leak was a result of the water treatment plant being impacted by the fire.

Chlorine gas can irritate the eyes, nose and throat. It can also cause lung injuries and, in severe cases, sudden death, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The North Rim remains closed for firefighting operations.

The chlorine leak has also prompted closures of Phantom Ranch, which sits at the bottom of the Grand Canyon just north of the Colorado River; the North Kaibab Trail, which begins on the North Rim and descends to the river; and the South Kaibab Trail, which begins on the South Rim and descends to the Colorado.

France is celebrating Bastille Day with nationwide festivities commemorating the 1789 storming of the Bastille prison, a pivotal moment in the French Revolution.

In Paris, the celebration features 7,000 participants marching along the Champs-Elysees, including troops and armoured vehicles, followed by fighter jet flyovers and a spectacular drone light show at the Eiffel Tower.

The holiday showcases revolutionary spirit and military prowess. The parade beneath the Arc de Triomphe began with President Emmanuel Macron reviewing troops and relighting the eternal flame. Each uniform carries symbolic elements, particularly the distinctive French Foreign Legion contingent with their bearded troops wearing leather aprons and carrying axes.

In his Bastille Day speech, Macron highlighted growing global threats and announced increased military spending.

Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto was the guest of honour this year as 200 Indonesian drummers joined the parade. The visit is expected to yield agreements on French military equipment purchases, including Rafale jets. Finnish, Belgian, and Luxembourg troops also participated, reflecting the event’s increasingly international character.

Special guests included Fousseynou Samba Cisse, a French man who received a personal invitation from Macron after rescuing two babies from a burning apartment. The holiday period also featured prestigious awards, with this year’s Legion of Honour recipients including Gisele Pelicot, who became a symbol for sexual violence victims during a high-profile trial.

The raw statistics speak to the scale of the suffering in two places, separated by decades.

Israel has killed more than 58,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, many of them women and children, and injured more than 138,000.

With constant bombardment, man-made famine, and tactics like declaring a safe zone and then bombing it, experts say what Israel is doing amounts to genocide.

In the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed some 68,000 Bosniaks, rounding people up based on ethnicity.

On July 11, 1995, Serb fighters rounded up and killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in a United Nations-declared “safe zone” in the town of Srebrenica.

That was the only legally recognised genocide of the Bosnian War.

On the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide and as Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continues, Al Jazeera spoke to Iva Vukusic, assistant professor in international history at Utrecht University, and Nimer Sultany, Palestinian legal scholar at the University of London, about the parallels between the two.

Safe zones that aren’t

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has said his country intends to round up some 600,000 people who are in what Israel once designated as a “safe zone” – and subsequently violated several times – and push them into a “concentration zone” in Rafah.

People would only be allowed to leave this “concentration zone” if they were “voluntarily emigrating” from Gaza.

“We have seen … Israeli academics, legal scholars, really objecting to this plan and calling it a manifest example of a war crime,” Vukusic explained.

“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” former Israeli Prime Minister said bluntly about the Katz announcement in an interview with the Guardian on Sunday.

Implied in Israel’s claim that it would secure this concentration zone from the outside, and that aid would be distributed within, is the idea that this zone will be yet another Israeli “safe zone” in its war on Gaza.

A unilaterally declared safe zone, however, does not include the external controls and mechanisms that were part of the Srebrenica safe zone 30 years ago, Vukusic pointed out. These controls included international peacekeepers as well as UN Security Council Resolution 819, declaring Srebrenica a safe area.

The UN declaration of the safe zone came after thousands of Bosnians streamed into Srebrenica, seeking safety from relentless attacks by Bosnian Serb fighters acting under “Directive 7” to cut Srebrenica off from any other areas.

Hemmed in and starving, people were trapped.

The external mechanisms monitoring it did not prevent the massacre of thousands of Bosniak boys and men, a failure of the international community’s pledge to “never again” allow mass atrocities. And, in Gaza, even the appearance of UN protection mechanisms is lacking.

“We see that failure of ‘never again’ when it comes to Gaza, because Israel has systematically expelled and dismantled any kind of UN presence and prevented international organisations from performing their minimal humanitarian objectives,” Sultany said.

In Bosnia, as in Gaza, people were forced to flee for their lives in the face of relentless violence by the attacking forces.

Israel has issued expulsion order after expulsion order, pushing people out of one part of Gaza into another, then back again. It declared certain areas as “safe zones”, then proceeded to bomb them as refugees slept in flimsy tents that Israeli bombs turned into infernos in seconds.

Displacement and its physical and psychological toll on refugees have been studied in various contexts, with scientists finding that displaced people suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety disorders at much higher rates due to the uncertainty of displacement, the destruction of social support systems, and the inability to maintain a semblance of “normal life”.

Add to that the forced starvation Israel is imposing on Gaza, which takes a physical and mental toll, as people watch their loved ones die of malnutrition or from curable diseases that their bodies are too weak to fight.

Sultany pointed out that “forcible transfers, in which Palestinians are being forced into increasingly shrinking spaces with limited ability to survive and dire humanitarian conditions”, have been a hallmark of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Therefore, while Katz’s comments were a continuation/extension of what was already being seen on the ground, this now resembles an official plan.

“The question of forcible transfer is part of the declared objectives of the so-called Gideon’s Chariots military campaign in early May 2025 [and] it was also part of the so-called General’s Plan in northern Gaza in October till December 2024,” he clarified.

How to make a society accept genocide

Israel’s actions in Gaza are widely documented, with daily accounts of unarmed Palestinians being shot by snipers or bombed from above.

Israel has been denounced for its indiscriminate killing of civilians, especially after investigations showed that its army had allowed itself a higher “margin of error” when it came to killing civilians in this conflict, compared to its past wars on Gaza.

Both experts argued that this is widely accepted within Israel because Palestinians have been dehumanised, much as Bosniaks were during the 1990s.

Sultany said, in both Bosnia and Gaza today, civilians have been stripped of their civilian status, or innocence, through repeated messaging to society at large.

Early examples include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framing the assault on Gaza and its civilians as a “holy war” and using Biblical references to equate Palestinians to ancient foes to justify these actions by saying: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.”

Most recently,  far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in May that Gaza’s population would soon be choked into a small strip of land to make them “totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places”.

Documents from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia pointed to several instances of propaganda by Bosnian Serb leaders to dehumanise Bosniaks and brand them as “foreigners”, including claiming that Bosniaks were all assassins with “kill lists” of Bosnian Serbs.

Such descriptors, Sultany said, give aggressors a “justification for the killing of civilians” and make the killing more palatable to society.

“We see all of that now in Gaza in the last 21 months,” Sultany added.

Vukusic agreed, telling Al Jazeera that in both Bosnia and Gaza, there has been a “deep process of dehumanisation to allow for the societal acceptance of such acts where you see a people [who are] civilians as enemies”.

There becomes a “broad acceptance of acts committed by the government where only the suffering of yourself and your people [is seen] and it absolutely does not matter what the costs are for somebody else”, she added.

This shift is apparent in how freely and often Israeli officials have made openly genocidal statements.

Serbian leaders, including Slobodan Milosevic (president of the Republic of Serbia from 1990 to 1997 and Serbia and Montenegro until 2000), were tried by the International Court of Justice for genocide and war crimes. Milosevic died before he was convicted.

“If you compare what Slobodan Milosevic was saying to some of the things that Israeli ministers are saying, Slobodan Milosevic was never, ever that open and was never, ever that explicit,” she said.

Because statements by Israeli officials are so explicit, “the determination of the genocidal intent would probably be much easier to make”, she added.

Inaction, politics and the international community

Western nations were initially reluctant to involve themselves in the Bosnian War, but the horror of Srebrenica eventually moved them to action, with NATO conducting an air campaign against Bosnian Serb forces in August and September 1995, eventually leading to the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war.

Yet many of the countries that led the defence of the Bosniaks after Srebrenica are some of Israel’s biggest backers.

“In many ways, this is a Western genocide,” Sultany said. “There is a US-Israel genocide, a genocide that was backed from the beginning by major European and North American powers.

“This is fundamental to understanding the Western support for and justification for the genocide in Palestine,” Sultany said.

“It’s not only that the West was a reluctant observer, and they failed to prevent the genocide. They were actively from the beginning supporting it, shielding it diplomatically and politically and financing and arming it.”

Elusive justice

What did justice look like for the victims in Bosnia, and is that a model that could be followed in Gaza?

In the case of Bosnia, there is no universal position on the question of justice among the victims.

Vukusic said some were satisfied with the prison sentences given to high-level officials convicted of genocide, while others are disappointed because not all the hundreds of people who participated in war crimes or genocidal acts were held to account.

Sultany, after a recent visit to Bosnia, is convinced that Bosnians have been failed by international justice.

“The initial case was brought in 1993, [but] was delivered in 2007, almost 14 years later,” he said. “So the wheels of justice grind very slowly.”

He added that Srebrenica, a single massacre, was singled out among years of massacres and ethnic cleansing committed by Bosnian Serb forces.

“Anyone who was killed before or after or [in] different areas is not considered a victim of genocide because of the detrimental effects of the legal delimitation of what is a genocide in the case of Bosnia,” he said.

In Gaza, where attacks against Palestinians are ongoing, justice may be difficult to envision. While the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in November 2024, the international community has failed to follow through on them.

Vukusic said expectations should be tempered when considering international justice, but that prosecutions are still important, allowing facts to be established in court, and messages sent about what the law does not allow.

For example, Vukusic said: “You cannot cut off a civilian population [from food and water], you cannot make them thirsty and hungry and without medicine, you cannot bomb universities, you cannot raze to the ground a whole area where two million people live.

“Those [messages] may be helpful, but nothing is going to restore what people have lost,” she said. “Nothing is going to bring back dead family members.”

“In both cases [Bosnia and Palestine], there is a failure of prevention mechanisms,” Sultany said. “And the fact that it fails again … is a miscarriage of justice in itself that requires us to rethink the international legal order.”

Sultany added that the ongoing injustices against Palestinians are down to “long-term impunity” and “the fact that the Israelis have not been held to account by any meaningful legal mechanisms”.

“Never again” has not been put into practice when it comes to Palestinians, according to Sultany.