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Three weeks prior, a Sudanese woman identified only as Hala for security reasons left the displacement camp in Tawila to travel 60 kilometers east back to her hometown of el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur seized by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) a full year earlier. She boarded a small vehicle operated by the paramilitary group, which has spent the past year terrorizing local civilians through widespread killings, sexual violence, and mass looting. Upon her arrival, Hala found the city unrecognizable: homes ransacked or reduced to rubble, once-familiar streets distorted by destruction. RSF fighters immediately intercepted her the moment she stepped off the transport, interrogating her about her destination, planned length of stay, and exact home address to verify she was not lying. After describing her property and explaining she needed more than 24 hours to sort through wreckage to retrieve critical documents including her birth certificate and national ID from the powerless, dark home, she was granted a handwritten entry permit signed by the group. Hala described the pervasive, arbitrary danger facing all residents and returnees: RSF fighters can break into homes unannounced, threaten sexual assault to coerce compliance, beat detainees, or imprison anyone who dares to argue. She noted that travel to el-Fasher is uniquely life-threatening for women, with most people making the dangerous trip being elderly residents or fathers, as young men face near-certain targeted harm. On her second day in the city, Hala was accosted on a public street by RSF fighters who shouted abusive, insulting language at her; only the presence of other nearby civilians prevented a physical attack. She recalled the cruel, dissonant rhetoric the fighters used even amid threats: “The strangest thing is that they might assault you and then tell you that el-Fasher belongs to you, that this is your home, and that you are welcome to return.” Hala fled back to Tawila shortly after, vowing she will never step foot in el-Fasher again, no matter how much conditions improve. The full-scale RSF offensive to seize el-Fasher launched on 26 October 2025, after more than 500 days of brutal siege, marking the deadliest single massacre of Sudan’s ongoing war that first erupted in April 2023 between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), a conflict that has spawned the world’s largest current humanitarian crisis. Researchers at Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab emphasized the speed and industrial scale of the killings were comparable in scope to the Rwandan genocide. Backed by the United Arab Emirates, which continues to deny any involvement in the conflict, RSF fighters filmed themselves perpetrating mass civilian executions. Survivors have documented widespread atrocities including targeted rape of girls and young women, forced blood extraction from survivors held in makeshift clinics, and systematic extortion of civilian households. Mohamed Hassan, an el-Fasher resident who escaped to safety, recounted to Middle East Eye how RSF fighters rounded up dozens of families on local streets, separated men from women and children, verbally abused and lashed the women, and opened fire randomly on the men, executing immediately anyone they suspected of being affiliated with the SAF or allied joint forces. Hanin, a Sudanese mother who fled el-Fasher with only her young daughter in her arms, took shelter in Tawila but has never felt the sense of safety she expected to find there. “I survived horrible things. There are things that happened to me that I struggle to speak about. I am a mother, and I tried to protect my daughter. I cannot explain what it does to you to see your child suffer violence and know that you could not stop it. We survived, but survival does not mean we are no longer hurting,” she shared. An aid worker identified as Anna confirmed that the RSF now operates a network of informal detention facilities across el-Fasher, repurposing old buildings to hold detainees who are denied food and life-saving medical care when they fall ill. Roughly 107,000 people fled el-Fasher in the six weeks before the final RSF offensive, leaving an estimated 260,000 civilians trapped inside the city when the assault began. Humanitarian groups including Doctors Without Borders have raised the unanswerable question of what happened to the thousands of additional residents unaccounted for. The full final death toll may never be confirmed: monitoring groups using satellite imagery recorded at least 6,000 fatalities in the first 72 hours of the offensive alone, but the RSF has imposed a total communications blackout on the city and barred all human rights investigators from entering. One year later, bodies continue to be uncovered, and the casualty count keeps rising. This week, 200 mass graves were discovered in the North Kordofan town of Bara, where volunteer recovery teams have pulled more than 600 civilian corpses from sites witnesses confirm were the location of RSF killings during the same October 2025 offensive that captured el-Fasher. A series of formal global findings over the past year have formally classified the RSF’s actions as genocide: in February, the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan concluded the RSF carried out acts of genocide in el-Fasher, noting genocidal intent was the only reasonable inference that could be drawn from the group’s documented conduct. The U.S. government, alongside leading human rights organizations including the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and Amnesty International, have also formally designated RSF atrocities in Darfur as genocide. In July, Amnesty International described the massacres in el-Fasher as “a stain on the conscience of humanity.” The final offensive marked the culmination of a months-long genocidal campaign: the RSF laid full siege to el-Fasher from May 2024 to October 2025, constructing large earthen berms around the entire city to trap civilians inside, shelling residential areas on a near-daily basis, and completely cutting off access to incoming food and medical supplies. The World Food Programme reported that trapped residents were eventually forced to survive on animal fodder and discarded food waste after all trade routes into the city were blocked. A senior doctor who spent nearly two years working inside an el-Fasher hospital described the agonizing conditions of the siege to MEE: the facility became the entire world for its staff, who slept on site, scavenged for whatever food they could find, and spent nearly all their waking hours caring for patients. As the siege tightened, medical supplies ran completely dry, essential medicines were exhausted, and medical equipment broke down with no way to repair it. Reliable electricity and clean water access disappeared entirely, with generators only permitted to run for two hours each night. Life-saving emergency surgeries were performed using only the light from mobile phone flashlights, with no access to surgical gauze or available antibiotics. “One of the most painful experiences for a doctor is watching a patient deteriorate when you know exactly what treatment they need but have no way of providing it. That happened far too often in el-Fasher,” the doctor said, noting that staff suffered the same malnutrition and lack of care as their patients, with some colleagues falling severely ill or malnourished but continuing to work to treat waiting civilians. Any resident who attempted to break the RSF blockade to bring in food supplies faced immediate deadly punishment: Human Rights Watch documented multiple lethal attacks on young people and traders running supply routes, with reports of public executions of people caught carrying food. One widely circulated video showed a young woman named Qisma Ali Omar hung by her arms from a tree with her feet bound, filmed by RSF fighters for public distribution. When the city fell on 26 October 2025, RSF fighters first targeted sites where displaced families and civilians had gathered to seek shelter: nearly 500 people were massacred at the Saudi Maternity Hospital, where patients, medical staff, and displaced families made up almost entirely of women and children had taken refuge. UN investigators later documented coordinated mass killings at el-Fasher University, the Saudi Hospital, on all escape routes out of the city, and at the earthen berms originally built to trap residents. Amnesty International verified multiple videos showing an RSF commander executing civilian captives, while other footage captured dozens of civilian bodies piled in a trench running alongside the city’s perimeter berm. In the aftermath of the killings, the RSF launched a systematic cover-up campaign: Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab identified 150 clusters of objects consistent with human remains between 26 October and 28 November 2025, 20 of which showed clear signs of burning, and 57 of which were completely erased and disappeared within four weeks. Satellite imagery captured repeated burning of a pit full of apparent human remains at the Saudi Maternity Hospital through November, while large piles of suspected bodies beside the berm were cleared away entirely. RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti, later announced a formal investigation into what he called “violations” committed by his troops during the capture of el-Fasher. One year later, el-Fasher stands as a city of ruins and trapped remaining civilians. When a tightly supervised UN team was finally granted access to the city in December 2025, they described the entire urban area as an active crime scene, and found very few remaining residents, one in six of whom screened positive for severe acute malnutrition. Even civilians who successfully escaped el-Fasher have not been safe from RSF persecution: survivors report the paramilitary group still detains fleeing men and demands ransoms as high as $3,000 for their release, with one monitoring group documenting nearly 68,000 arbitrary civilian detentions. The once small town of Tawila now hosts roughly 800,000 displaced people, the vast majority of whom fled from el-Fasher. Khadijah, an elderly woman originally from el-Geneina in West Darfur, traced her long journey of displacement across Darfur after the RSF seized her hometown in the summer of 2023, leaving bodies uncollected in the streets. “I fled to el-Fasher seeking safety. But conflict followed, forcing me to displacement again. Now, I live under a tree on a farm, exposed to the elements. There is little food here, and I have no shelter. The cold is unbearable. I’m struggling to survive,” she shared. Mudathir Mohammed Diqourni, a member of an el-Fasher civilian resistance committee, warned that RSF militias are now systematically destroying farmland across South and Central Darfur, deliberately targeting and shooting farmers as they travel to their fields or attempt to protect their crops and agricultural property. Widespread hunger is now pushing rural villagers to flee toward Tawila in search of life-saving relief, a pattern Diqourni describes as deliberate demographic engineering, designed to drive the last remaining rural Darfur residents into displacement camps or across international borders through a policy of systematic starvation and impoverishment. The haunting image of farmers racing against RSF-affiliated Janjaweed fighters on camelback through fields to salvage scraps of fodder for their own livestock has become a defining symbol of the crisis. From their stronghold in el-Fasher, the RSF has expanded its campaign of violence east into Kordofan and south toward the Ethiopian border. The UN’s fact-finding mission has found reasonable grounds to confirm that private companies and recruiters operating out of the UAE have routed weapons, drone components, logistical support, and mercenary personnel to the RSF through supply routes running through Chad, southeastern Libya, and Bosaso in Somalia. Middle East Eye has previously published extensive investigative reports documenting this supply network, as well as the use of Ethiopian military bases to provide direct support to RSF operations. The United States remains the UAE’s largest single source of military hardware: the Trump administration pushed through $1.4 billion in sales of Chinook helicopters and F-16 spare parts to Abu Dhabi in May 2025 despite an active congressional hold, and approved more than $8 billion in new sales of weapons, drones, and missiles earlier this year, with billions more in additional arms transfers that bypassed mandatory congressional review entirely. British-manufactured weaponry has also been recovered from Sudanese battlefields, with the UK government facing widespread accusations that it failed to intervene to stop the el-Fasher massacre out of fear of damaging diplomatic and economic ties with the UAE. Today, volunteer recovery teams in Bara are still digging through mass graves to recover civilian remains, Khadijah still sleeps exposed under a tree on a Tawila-area farm, and Hanin sees fellow displaced people in the camp grow weaker by the day, with some dying from starvation overnight. “El-Fasher has completely changed. We have now reached a point where, if you want to visit your own home, you need permission from the RSF. That alone shows the situation we have reached. We just hope the war ends and things get better,” Hala said in a final plea for global action.

On 4 November 2026, millions of South African voters will cast their ballots to elect local municipal councils, the bodies legally tasked with delivering core public services: maintaining consistent running water, executing regular waste collection, and repairing the network of potholes that riddle urban and suburban roads nationwide. However, as years of underinvestment have left critical public infrastructure crumbling, cost-of-living surges have pushed millions of households into financial precarity, and widespread public frustration with underperforming local administrations continues to mount, the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza, widely labelled a genocide by the South African government, has emerged as an unexpected, deeply divisive priority for many voters ahead of polling day. Back in December 2023, South Africa launched a historic legal case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ highest judicial body, accusing Israel of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention through its military actions in the Gaza Strip, where official death tolls now exceed 74,500 people. Yet the national political landscape remains sharply split over this legal action, with not every major party endorsing the case or accepting the formal genocide designation. Most notably, the Democratic Alliance (DA), a major participant in South Africa’s current national unity government alongside the long-ruling African National Congress (ANC), has refused to extend congratulations to renowned South African jurist Navi Pillay on her Nobel Peace Prize, awarded three weeks prior. Senior DA leaders have publicly dismissed Pillay’s work documenting allegations of genocide in Gaza as “divisive”, despite her ongoing tenure as a judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The pro-business, staunchly pro-Israel DA was formed in 2000 via a multi-party alliance that included the direct successor to the apartheid-era National Party, the regime that enforced decades of racial segregation across South Africa. This bitter partisan rift has left millions of ordinary voters facing an unprecedented electoral conundrum. Against the backdrop of a sustained national economic downturn, sky-high inflation, and well-documented systemic corruption, voters are forced to choose between long-ruling parties that have repeatedly failed to deliver basic public services, and opposition parties that promise administrative reform but hold widely condemned, weak stances on the ongoing genocide in Gaza. No city embodies this electoral tension more acutely than Johannesburg, South Africa’s bustling economic heart, where residents have faced years of rolling blackouts, water shortages, and crumbling public infrastructure amid successive unstable coalition administrations. Local campaigners have urged voters to “rescue” the city from decades of mismanagement, corruption, and decay by handing control to the DA, which currently governs the Western Cape province including the city of Cape Town. This claim that the DA represents Johannesburg’s best path to functional recovery has ignited fierce debate among academics, activists, and ordinary residents, laying bare deep divisions over how much weight voters should assign to a party’s position on the Gaza crisis when casting their local ballots. Last week, Adam Habib, the London-based vice-chancellor of SOAS University and a prominent South African academic, publicly urged Johannesburg residents to vote for DA mayoral candidate Helen Zille. In a widely shared post on X, Habib wrote that he was stunned by the advanced state of decay he witnessed during a recent visit to his home city, and argued that Zille — who previously served as mayor of Cape Town from 2006 to 2009 and as Western Cape premier from 2009 to 2019 — offered the only credible recovery plan for Johannesburg, even as he personally rejected her party’s stance on Gaza. The DA first took power in Cape Town as part of a coalition government in 2006, before securing an outright majority in 2011, and has administered the city continuously ever since. As dozens of municipalities run by the ANC or unstable rival coalitions have slid deeper into disrepair, Cape Town has cultivated a widespread public reputation for competent, efficient governance. “We are not choosing between saints and sinners. There does not have to be a trade-off, but there is one now. I would prefer my mayor to pronounce on genocide, but if I had a choice between a corrupt mayor and an honest one who cannot pronounce genocide, I will take the honest one,” Habib wrote. “Zille is the only candidate if we want power, water, services and honesty and competence. Zille is the only candidate if Johannesburg is to survive.” Critics of this framing, however, push back hard, arguing that South Africa’s hard-won constitutional values of human dignity and equality are not secondary priorities. “Our hardwon Constitutional values and rights are not middle-class luxuries,” said Irfan Mangera, a leader with the progressive Rise Mzansi political party. Johannesburg, South Africa’s wealthiest city, has cycled through seven different mayors over the past five years as successive fragile coalition governments collapsed amid infighting and corruption scandals. But activists based in both Johannesburg and Cape Town argue that beyond the moral failure of sidelining the Gaza genocide to secure functioning streetlights and paved roads, Cape Town’s reputation as the country’s best-run city is largely a myth, sustained almost exclusively for the benefit of its wealthiest, mostly white residents. They reject Habib’s argument, widely shared among middle- and upper-class South African voters, that a leader who refuses to acknowledge a documented genocide can still be considered a fundamentally honest public servant. “The people of Johannesburg deserve functioning services by honest and capable leadership and leaders whose moral compass does not disappear when confronted with injustice (past, present and future),” Mangera told Middle East Eye. He added that Habib’s remarks “lacked political imagination” and constructed “a false dichotomy between administrative competence and moral conviction as though the two cannot coexist”, noting that demands for reliable public services should never require voters to lower their ethical expectations of local elected leaders. While the DA has faced widespread public backlash for its ostensibly “neutral” stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict, critics also point out that the ANC has frequently weaponised the national government’s ICJ case against Israel to distract voters from its own long track record of administrative incompetence at the local level. Other political observers note that for all the ANC’s public rhetoric about advancing equitable wealth redistribution, its decades-long embrace of neoliberal economic policies — including prioritising privatisation and ceding extensive power to large corporate interests — has severely limited its ability to meet the basic needs of poor South Africans and dismantle the structural economic inequities inherited from the apartheid era. At the southern tip of the African continent, Cape Town is globally marketed as a world-class tourist paradise, with its affluent central business district, tree-lined elite suburbs, and immaculately maintained gardens framed by the dramatic cliffs of Table Mountain overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, regularly ranking it among the most beautiful cities on earth. But this polished public image conceals deep, persistent racial and economic inequalities directly shaped by the legacy of apartheid spatial planning. Beyond the viral, Instagram-perfect shots of Cape Town’s mountain ranges and white-sand beaches lie sprawling, under-resourced townships and informal settlements that house hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers who keep the city’s lucrative tourism and service industries running. For these residents, basic municipal services are either entirely non-existent or priced far out of reach. Elethu Nkala, programme manager at Cape Town-based civil society group the Pivot Collective, told Middle East Eye that labelling Cape Town South Africa’s best-run municipality was “a bold claim” given the brutal living conditions in poor townships and the city’s punitive approach to governing working-class areas deemed “high risk”. “The development policies it pushes are concerning. There is a disconnect between the people and the way the government approaches development,” Nkala explained. In January 2026, the city unveiled a suite of controversial public safety measures including the N2 Edge project, which proposed building a 9-kilometre long physical barrier along a major highway to “improve security”. Local activists immediately drew parallels between the proposed wall and the separation barrier Israel built in the occupied West Bank, and called on the city to address the root causes of violent crime rather than investing in exclusionary infrastructure, while directing public funds to improve quality of life for informal settlement residents. Earlier in 2026, the city also faced widespread public condemnation for deploying heavily armed SWAT teams and military-style armoured vehicles to the Cape Flats residential area to crack down on gang violence. Opposition parties and community activists warned that this heavy-handed approach would only further militarise marginalised neighbourhoods, and failed to address the root drivers of crime, including the fact that Cape Town still has one of the highest measured income inequality rates in the world. “They are neglecting their community development mandate and overemphasising and overfunding their policing mandate,” Brett Herron, the GOOD Party’s Cape Town mayoral candidate, told local media outlets. A spokesperson for Johannesburg’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign went a step further, noting that the city’s turn to “building walls” and “deploying troops” to solve deep-seated social, political and economic inequities bore a striking resemblance to Israeli state tactics. “They are importing Israeli logic into South Africa to reinforce spatial apartheid in Cape Town and then calling it effective governance,” the spokesperson said. A 2023 peer-reviewed study published by South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council found that nearly 40% of residents in Cape Town’s poorest neighbourhoods could only access running water from shared communal taps outside their homes, while 36% relied on shared public toilets. While Cape Town is generally statistically safer than other major South African cities, the township areas within its municipal boundaries record some of the country’s highest rates of violent crime, including gender-based violence, illicit drug trafficking, gang violence, vigilante attacks, and murder, the report confirmed. The study concluded that sustainably reducing crime would require “building a common commitment across different groups to narrow the gap between neighbourhoods and to expand the economy in an inclusive manner”, and urged the city administration to “rethink its approach to service delivery and collaborate with communities, civil society organisations and the private sector to empower people to rebuild their troubled communities”. On South Africa’s east coast, the coastal city of Durban faces chronic, recurring water cuts, regular sewage spills that contaminate public beaches, and a crippling shortage of affordable housing. Thousands of low-income residents crowd into overcrowded informal settlements where apartheid-era inequities in access to services, public transport, and economic opportunity remain fully intact. Local children are often seen playing in standing rainwater sludge, while rotting piles of uncollected garbage line residential pavements and driveways. Large numbers of young, unemployed men loiter outside small local “spaza” convenience stores and hardware shops, waiting for casual day labour opportunities. In Durban too, debates over municipal service delivery reform have become inextricably tangled up with national conversations about the Gaza genocide. Last week, Hossain Haniff, the DA’s mayoral candidate for Durban, stated during a public election debate that he would be open to inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit the city if the trip could deliver tangible economic benefits for local residents. His remarks sparked immediate widespread outrage among civil society groups and community activists, who argue that it is impossible to separate domestic local governance from international crimes of dispossession, as these repressive state tactics directly shape how municipal governments operate, and whether fundamental human rights are ultimately protected at home. South Africa has faced sustained diplomatic and economic pressure from both the United States and Israel over its pro-Palestine stance, including its decision to bring the ICJ genocide case. In February 2025, then-US President Donald Trump formally cut all foreign aid to South Africa, citing the Gaza genocide case and the country’s land reform policies, while publicly spreading the false, debunked conspiracy theory that the South African government was perpetrating a genocide against white farmers. “These matters are connected. And it’s not some romantic idea of solidarity or morality. There are tangible connections between what is happening in the municipalities in South Africa and what is happening in Palestine,” a spokesperson for the Gauteng branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign told Middle East Eye. “Inequality in South Africa is a municipal issue and a national issue, and this issue is also connected directly to the genocide.”