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In a landmark ruling marking the first judicial conviction of senior Rapid Support Forces (RSF) leadership since Sudan’s brutal civil war erupted in April 2023, an anti-terrorism court based in Port Sudan handed down death sentences in absentia on Sunday to RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo—widely known as Hemedti—and 15 other co-defendants. The convictions center on allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and the targeted assassination of West Darfur Governor Khamis Abdullah Abakar in the West Darfur capital of el-Geneina.

The case was rooted in the 2023 assassination of Governor Abakar, which occurred just 24 hours after the governor publicly condemned RSF shelling of the el-Jamarik neighborhood in el-Geneina. Circulated video evidence showing RSF fighters mutilating Abakar’s body has been publicly available, though the paramilitary group has consistently denied involvement and pinned blame on the opposing Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).

Human Rights Watch’s 2024 investigation into violence in el-Geneina concluded that the attacks against the Masalit people and other non-Arab communities in the region amounted to ethnic cleansing, with strong evidence pointing to acts of genocide. Data from Middle East Eye’s June 2023 reporting estimates that roughly 1,500 people were killed in el-Geneina in the first two months of the war alone, forcing tens of thousands of Masalit civilians to flee on foot across the border to refugee camps in eastern Chad.

Among the convicted defendants are two of Hemedti’s brothers: RSF deputy leader Abdel Rahim Hamdan Dagalo and Algoney Hamdan Daglo Musa, commonly referred to as al-Qoni. Additional high-profile convictions include West Darfur RSF commander Abdel Rahman Juma Barkallah and the region’s former deputy governor al-Tijani al-Tahir Karshoum.

Presiding over the trial, special judge Mohamed al-Amin ruled that Hemedti bore direct legal responsibility for orchestrating the genocide of the Masalit community and organizing the siege of el-Geneina. The judgment detailed systemic patterns of property destruction and looting, as well as deliberate targeted attacks on civilian populations, residential zones, schools, and religious sites. Abdel Rahim Dagalo was found guilty of co-organizing the el-Geneina siege, mass civilian displacement, and the Masalit genocide; al-Qoni was convicted of facilitating the siege; and Barkallah was held responsible for leading frontline RSF fighters in coordinated assaults on Masalit-majority neighborhoods.

Alongside the death sentences, the court ordered the full confiscation of all RSF assets and directed Sudanese authorities to request Interpol red notices to secure the arrest and extradition of all convicted individuals. In his closing statement, Judge Amin delivered a blistering rebuke of the RSF’s actions, noting that the group deployed heavy weaponry in residential areas, carried out widespread looting, arson, and sexual violence, and acted on explicit ethnic hatred with the goal of eradicating the Masalit community.

“These convicted individuals were state leaders who abused their authority and turned state weapons—meant to protect citizens—into tools of crime,” Judge Amin said. “Their actions left thousands dead or displaced, destroyed an entire city, and erased its civilization and history.”

The Port Sudan ruling comes just days after International Criminal Court (ICC) Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Khan announced a “breakthrough” in the court’s investigations into alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in West Darfur, following an investigative trip to eastern Chad. However, a recent Middle East Eye investigation uncovered that the ICC prosecutor’s office has privately decided not to move forward with an arrest warrant application for an RSF member, despite three years of investigations and public promises that applications would be filed imminently. The decision has sparked growing scrutiny over the timeline and commitment of international judicial action against RSF leadership.

While international progress on accountability remains slow, the first extraterritorial prosecution attempt against RSF members has already been launched in neighboring Kenya. On June 9, 12 Sudanese victims represented by Legal Action Worldwide and the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies filed a formal complaint alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity with Kenya’s Director of Public Prosecutions, relying on the principle of universal jurisdiction.

The complaint calls for an investigation into allegations of torture and sexual violence committed by 10 RSF members, several of whom are believed to currently reside in Kenya. The filing directly undermines the Kenyan government’s long-standing public partnership with the RSF: Kenyan President William Samoei Ruto has hosted Hemedti at the country’s State House, allowed the RSF to hold meetings for a parallel Sudanese administration in Nairobi, and granted Kenyan passports to RSF leaders to facilitate cross-border travel. Critics further accuse the Ruto administration of supplying crates of ammunition to the paramilitary group and enabling the smuggling and export of Sudanese gold and gum arabic through Kenyan ports.
“This moment is not just a test of Kenya’s commitment to upholding international justice,” said Dr. Owiso Owiso, lead Kenyan counsel for the 12 victims. “It also proves that even when domestic accountability systems and the broader international community have failed the people of Sudan, avenues to seek justice are not completely closed.”

Seven months after taking on the presidency of PEN America, one of the United States’ most prominent literary organizations dedicated to defending free speech, award-winning Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu has stepped down from his post. His departure, announced last week, stems from long-simmering frustration over what he calls systemic unfair treatment of Palestinians at the organization, in contrast to its positioning toward Israelis and Jewish Americans.

Mengestu’s resignation came in the wake of PEN America’s release of a new report documenting the professional and emotional harm faced by Israeli and Jewish-American writers in the aftermath of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, now stretching nearly three years. The report detailed multiple accounts of writers losing employment, speaking opportunities and career advancement due to their positions on the conflict. But for Mengestu, the report was just the latest example of the organization’s long-standing failure to uphold its core mission of defending free expression fairly and equitably across all sides of the conflict.

In an Instagram statement posted Sunday, Mengestu clarified that his departure was not a dispute over differing personal perspectives or experiences. Instead, he argued that PEN America’s ongoing institutional choices produce work that enables suppression through bigotry and deliberate indifference toward Palestinian voices. At the center of this disagreement is the organization’s long-standing stance on the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, a global nonviolent campaign launched in 2005 to end Israeli occupation, racial segregation and the blockade of Gaza, modeled on the anti-apartheid pressure campaign that helped end white minority rule in South Africa. Mengestu emphasized that BDS activity constitutes protected free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, a right PEN America has consistently failed to uphold.

For years, Mengestu noted, PEN America has framed BDS as a direct assault on the identity of Jewish students, while systematically diminishing Palestinian experiences of violence and dispossession to the point of near erasure. “What PEN America fails to understand is that a boycott is a form of dialogue,” he wrote. He added that the hundreds of writers who boycotted PEN America in 2024 did so to push for meaningful institutional change, and many only returned to the organization after being promised reform.

Many of those boycotting writers are affiliated with Writers Against The War on Gaza (WAWOG), a prominent collective that labeled Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a genocide just two weeks after it launched in October 2023 – a classification that has since been endorsed by the United Nations, leading historians and leading genocide scholars. WAWOG’s website documents more than 400 successful cultural boycott outcomes across North America since the start of the conflict. The group declined to share its full membership size or demographic breakdown with Middle East Eye, but an anonymous representative praised Mengestu’s decision to step down.

“We understand and commend [Mengestu] for not wanting to be associated with an institution that would… equate BDS as discriminatory,” the representative told Middle East Eye Monday. “For a lot of us, principles are the only thing we have.” The representative added that PEN America consistently draws false equivalence between material genocidal violence against Palestinians and the semantic disagreements raised by Zionist Israelis and Jewish Americans. “The desecration of cultural spaces in Gaza, wiping out the universities, killing scholars and writers and arresting them, it just doesn’t even compare,” they said.

When contacted for comment by Middle East Eye, PEN America offered only a brief, measured statement acknowledging Mengestu’s departure. “We are grateful for Dinaw Mengestu’s leadership and we respect that he’s made a decision he believes in,” the organization said. “We recognize people can disagree about how best to apply free expression principles in this extraordinarily difficult environment.” The 100-year-old institution, which centers its public mission on defending free expression in all its forms, outlined its formal stance on boycotts in the 9 July report on Israeli and Jewish writers: the organization opposes cultural and academic boycotts that inhibit the international exchange of art, literature and knowledge, but will defend the right of writers who choose to participate in such boycotts against professional retaliation.

PEN America confirmed to Middle East Eye that this caveat, affirming BDS participation as protected free speech, was only added to the organization’s public position in the past week. Prior to this update, the organization’s 2007-era stance on boycotts did not acknowledge that participating in or advocating for boycotts qualifies as protected free expression. Mengestu has characterized this last-minute adjustment as a hollow attempt to appease all sides amid mounting pressure for reform, though the organization has not publicly explained why it chose to update its position now after years of escalating criticism.

The 9 July report did acknowledge that no organized BDS campaign has called for targeting writers solely on the basis of their Jewish identity. It did, however, note that many Jewish writers have reported losing access to agents, publishers and public events since 7 October 2023, due to their Jewish identity, support for Zionism, or sympathy for Israel.

As of Monday, Gaza’s Ministry of Health has confirmed at least 73,231 Palestinians killed in Israeli military operations since the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks that killed roughly 1,200 people in southern Israel. Independent experts estimate an additional 10,000 Palestinians remain buried under rubble across the blockaded enclave, with hundreds of thousands more sustaining injuries. Even after a recently announced ceasefire brokered by former U.S. President Donald Trump on 10 October, 1,108 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes and sniper fire across Gaza.

In a direct challenge to a recent Israeli High Court of Justice ruling that deemed a prior access ban unlawful, Israeli authorities have implemented sweeping new restrictions that effectively expand a blanket ban on International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) access to Palestinian captives held in Israeli prisons.

Last week, Israel Prison Service (IPS) Commissioner Kobi Yaakobi formalized the new sweeping regulations, which impose far-reaching limits on the humanitarian organization’s ability to carry out routine visits to detained Palestinians. Under the updated rules, Red Cross representatives are barred entirely from visiting multiple categories of Palestinian captives under any circumstances. This total ban applies to detainees the IPS labels as “highly violent”, as well as those held in solitary confinement and prisoners currently undergoing interrogation.

For the remaining detainees who are not subject to a total ban, visits are capped at just 30 minutes per meeting, and prison commanders retain full authority to cut humanitarian visits short at their own discretion without formal oversight. Additional constraints further restrict access: the Red Cross is only permitted to conduct one round of visits per quarter, and the organization is required to submit a pre-approved list of no more than five captives it intends to meet with ahead of any visit.

This latest policy shift directly defies a High Court order issued last month, which compelled the Israeli state to restore Red Cross access to Palestinian captives after an initial blanket ban was introduced immediately following the October 7, 2023 attacks in southern Israel. In a brief official statement defending the new measures, the IPS asserted that “The agency operates in accordance with the law. If any allegation is raised, it should be addressed through the appropriate channels.”

The new restrictions come just weeks after a parliamentary bill that would have formally codified a total ban on Red Cross visits failed to pass in the Israeli Knesset, falling in a 36-41 vote. The bill failed after ultra-Orthodox Haredi coalition parties boycotted the vote in protest over the ruling government’s failure to advance legislation key to their own policy agenda, in a move unrelated to the Red Cross access debate.

This report was originally published by Middle East Eye, an outlet that provides independent, on-the-ground coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and surrounding regions.

A wave of grassroots conscientious objection among young Israelis has sparked a disciplinary clash after an 11th-grade student at Ramat Gan’s Ohel Shem High School, a campus just outside Tel Aviv, was summoned for official punishment over distributing leaflets that urge peers to reject mandatory military service over Israel’s documented atrocities in Gaza and ongoing ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank. Leading Israeli daily Haaretz first reported the incident, which has pulled back the curtain on deep political tensions around military conscription and free speech within Israeli educational institutions.

The student was not immediately suspended, but school officials informed her that disciplinary action, including a suspension starting in the upcoming academic year, remains on the table. The teen was one of three young organizers who circulated the leaflets, titled “We Hereby Refuse,” just outside the Ohel Shem High School campus, per the Haaretz report.

The document directly calls on teens approaching conscription age to sign a pledge committing to refuse enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces, citing widespread war crimes committed by the military in occupied Palestinian territories that have continued since the outbreak of hostilities in October 2023. “We, teenagers slated for conscription in the Israeli Army, hereby refuse to take part in its crimes and to serve the dictatorial government’s interests,” the leaflet reads in part.

To date, organizers confirm that roughly 130 students have added their signatures to the refusal pledge. The campaign is backed by Mesarvot, an Israeli grassroots organization that provides support to young people who choose to refuse mandatory military service on conscientious and political grounds. The group has long criticized Israel’s education system for normalizing militarism, arguing that schools intentionally embed a pro-military worldview into daily student life from an early age.

The refusal letter expands on this critique, noting: “The schools prepare us for the army by embedding militaristic discourse. The truth is that the army is not a preordained fate – no one is born a soldier.” It adds that even with a temporary ceasefire in place in Gaza, “genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes continue,” highlighting that Israeli military forces and civilian settlers in the occupied West Bank are actively advancing a state-backed policy of ethnic cleansing. “We refuse to take part in moral wrongdoings,” the statement continues, adding that signatories refuse to “collaborate with a fascist government” and “continue the cycle of bloodshed.”

During the disciplinary meeting, Ohel Shem principal Israel Vilozny told the student that distributing activism materials focused on education or climate change would have been treated as a far less severe offense, according to the student’s account. The teen’s parents have hit back against the school’s action, accusing administrators of selective enforcement of campus rules and targeting their daughter for political persecution.

Vilozny has defended his handling of the case, arguing that the student broke campus policies by distributing unauthorized political materials on school grounds. The Ramat Gan municipality, which has oversight over the public high school, has issued a full statement backing the principal’s decision, framing mandatory military service as “a sacred value” at the core of Israeli civic life. While the municipality acknowledged that it supports open political dialogue on campus, it maintains that all political materials require advance approval from school leadership before they can be distributed.

In a controversial comparison, the municipality drew a parallel between the anti-conscription leaflets and the spread of racist ideology by followers of the extremist Kahanist movement, a far-right Jewish nationalist faction classified as a terrorist organization by multiple governments. “Tomorrow another student could show up with two Kahanists to spread racist poison,” the municipality’s statement warned. Officials also pushed back against messaging aligned with the International Court of Justice’s recent rulings on Israeli actions in Gaza, warning that the campus would not tolerate “propaganda in support of” those ICJ findings.

Mandatory military service remains one of the most central and widely accepted institutions in mainstream Israeli society, especially in urban centers like Ramat Gan, despite growing reporting of rising influence for extremist settler and ultranationalist factions within the Israeli military. Official Israeli military data published in February 2024 underscores this broad acceptance: 84 percent of eligible men from Ramat Gan enlist in the armed forces, with 38 percent serving in frontline combat roles. At Ohel Shem High School specifically, enlistment rates are even higher, with 93 percent of eligible male students joining the military and nearly half serving in combat units, the data shows.

The disciplinary incident comes as Gaza continues to grapple with widespread destruction from Israel’s military campaign, and Israeli media has documented a sharp, alarming rise in anti-Palestinian sentiment among young Israelis across the country’s educational system. An earlier Haaretz report published in the same month found that more than one-third of students in Israeli secular schools believe Palestinian citizens of Israel do not deserve equal rights or membership in Israeli society.

Five months after the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s decades-long authoritarian regime, Syria remains trapped in a cycle of sectarian fragmentation and political instability, with a provocative new proposal from a senior Druze spiritual leader throwing the country’s already fragile territorial status into question.

Speaking at a memorial marking one year since brutal sectarian violence erupted in the southern Syrian province of Sweida, Hikmat al-Hijri, the most prominent pro-Israel figure among Syria’s Druze community, has publicly floated the idea that Sweida could maintain its local autonomy under Israeli protection — or even formal integration as part of the Israeli state.

“Our core goal is to protect Sweida’s autonomy so our people can live in freedom and build a model of governance that works for this region,” al-Hijri told attendees at the event. “We will never forget those who have stood with us in our darkest hours. Given our geographic proximity, we give special recognition to the State of Israel. We extend respect to all who respect us, and we build on their support to secure lasting safety for our community.”

Syria’s fractured post-Assad landscape has been defined by recurring intercommunal violence since Assad was ousted by opposition forces in December 2024. While new interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa has formally pledged to protect all minority communities across the country, deep-seated mistrust persists. Al-Sharaa previously led the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group that carried out large-scale sectarian massacres targeting Druze communities during Syria’s 13-year civil war, leaving many minorities fearing targeted reprisals from the new government’s security forces.

Sectarian bloodshed has already shaken multiple regions since the regime change. Last year, armed clashes between suspected Assad loyalists and government forces in Latakia, the coastal heartland of Assad’s Alawite sect, escalated into mass violence that left at least 1,500 Alawites dead. A Reuters investigation later traced most of the civilian casualties to operations ordered by senior security officials based in Damascus.

In Sweida, the violence that broke out one year ago began as clashes between local Druze factions and Bedouin militias, and ultimately escalated into one of the deadliest episodes of intercommunal violence in post-civil war Syria. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights records that more than 2,000 people were killed in the fighting, including 789 Druze civilians. As the violence unfolded, Israel launched multiple air strikes across Sweida and even on the outskirts of Damascus, framing the intervention as a protective measure for the Druze minority.

Opinions on Israel remain deeply divided within Syria’s Druze community, and al-Hijri’s comments mark the most public and extreme stance yet from his pro-Israel faction, which controls armed militias in parts of Sweida and has repeatedly welcomed Israeli military intervention in the province.

The political chaos in Syria has been compounded by the controversial launch of the country’s new transitional parliament, which held its inaugural session on Sunday. In his opening address, al-Sharaa hailed the new body as the start of a “new chapter” for Syria, urging lawmakers to “serve as models of responsibility and competence, to build a culture of dialogue, uphold the rule of law, and respect for state institutions.”

But the structure of the new parliament has drawn widespread criticism from pro-democracy activists who had hoped for inclusive reform after Assad’s ouster. Al-Sharaa directly appointed one-third of the body’s seats, while the remaining two-thirds were selected by local committees stacked with government appointees. Critically, the selection process completely excluded representatives from Sweida, as well as from the Kurdish-majority northeast, where 32 parliamentary seats remain vacant.

Interim government officials defend the process, arguing that competitive popular elections are logistically impossible in the aftermath of a 13-year conflict that left hundreds of thousands of Syrians dead and millions more displaced inside the country and across the border. But critics say the undemocratic selection process has cemented the same pattern of authoritarian, top-down rule that defined Assad’s regime, leaving marginalized regions and communities even more alienated from the central government in Damascus.