A newly published investigation by Africa Intelligence has uncovered ongoing covert diplomatic and intelligence contacts between Israeli officials and senior leaders of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), holding meetings and hosting RSF delegations in Tel Aviv throughout Sudan’s brutal three-year civil conflict. The inquiry, which was released Friday, details two official RSF delegations that traveled to the Israeli coastal capital, with the first visit taking place in May 2025 and the second held in February 2026. According to the investigation’s findings, RSF representatives held closed-door talks with senior officials from the Africa Division of Israel’s foreign ministry as well as top leaders from Israeli national intelligence agencies. These high-level contacts are not a new development, the investigation confirms, but rather form part of a broader security and intelligence partnership that was established long before Sudan’s civil war erupted in April 2023. The first RSF delegation was led by Abdul Rahim Hamdan Dagalo, the deputy commander of the paramilitary group and brother of RSF chief Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known by his nickname Hemedti, alongside a third Dagalo brother, Algoney Hamdan Dagalo. For the second February 2026 visit, the Dagalo brothers were joined by Ezzadean Elsafi, the RSF’s top legal advisor, the report notes. Investigators found that the years-long cooperation between Israeli officials and Hemedti’s inner circle has reportedly centered on the transfer of sensitive surveillance technologies to the RSF, a development that could significantly expand the paramilitary group’s operational capabilities on the battlefield across Sudan. Israel has a long documented history of parallel outreach to both of Sudan’s competing warring parties, maintaining ties with the official Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, while cultivating a separate relationship with the RSF through Israel’s national intelligence agency Mossad. Diplomatic relations between Khartoum and Tel Aviv were formally normalized in 2021, when Sudan’s post-uprising Transitional Sovereignty Council signed the US-brokered Abraham Accords, making Sudan the third Arab-majority nation to officially normalize ties with the Jewish state. The revelation of these secret meetings comes as the RSF faces mounting international accusations of mass atrocities, including genocide and ethnic cleansing, during its military campaign across Sudan. Earlier this year, the United Nations’ Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan released a landmark conclusion that the RSF’s months-long October 2025 siege of el-Fasher, the capital of Sudan’s North Darfur region, carried all the “hallmarks of genocide.” In early July of 2026, an anti-terrorism and state crimes court based in Port Sudan, which is held under SAF control, handed down death sentences in absentia to RSF leader Hemedti and 15 other senior RSF figures. The court convicted the group on multiple charges including their role in the 2023 assassination of West Darfur Governor Khamis Abdullah Abakar, as well as crimes against humanity, war crimes, unlawful warfare, and acts of genocide in the West Darfur capital of el-Geneina. This historic ruling marks the first time RSF leadership has been formally convicted by a Sudanese judicial body since the outbreak of the civil war in April 2023. The trial centered heavily on the assassination of Governor Abakar, who was killed just one day after he publicly condemned RSF shelling attacks on the residential el-Jamarik neighborhood of el-Geneina. In 2024, global human rights watchdog Human Rights Watch released its own investigation concluding that the systematic violence carried out by the RSF in el-Geneina amounted to ethnic cleansing, and likely constituted genocide targeting the Masalit people and other non-Arab ethnic communities in the region. Despite widespread evidence including circulated video footage showing RSF fighters mutilating Abakar’s body, the RSF has repeatedly denied all responsibility for the killing and has instead blamed the atrocities on the SAF. As early as June 2023, just two months after the war began, independent regional outlet Middle East Eye reported that roughly 1,500 civilians had been killed in el-Geneina alone within the first eight weeks of conflict. The violence forced tens of thousands of Masalit civilians to flee their homes on foot, crossing the Sudan-Chad border to seek safety in eastern Chad.