KHARTOUM: Flames gripped the Sudanese capital Sunday and paramilitary forces attacked the army headquarters for the second day in a row, witnesses reported, as fighting raged into its six month.
“Clashes are now happening around the army headquarters with various types of weapons,” one Khartoum resident, who declined to be named, told AFP.
Other witnesses in southern Khartoum said they heard “huge bangs” as the army targeted bases of the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries with artillery.
Witnesses also reported fighting in the city of El-Obeid, 350 kilometers (about 220 miles) south.
Nawal Mohammed, 44, said battles Saturday and Sunday between the regular army and the paramilitaries have been “the most violent since the war began.”
Though her family lives at least three kilometers away from the nearest clashes, Mohammed said “doors and windows shook” with the force of explosions, while several buildings in central Khartoum were set alight.
In social media posts verified by AFP, users shared footage of flames devouring landmarks of the Khartoum skyline, including the ministry of justice and the Greater Nile Petroleum Oil Company Tower — a conical building with glass facades that had become an emblem of the city.
Other posts showed buildings — their windows blown out and their walls charred or pockmarked with bullets — smoldering.
“It’s distressing to see these institutions destroyed like this,” Badr Al-Din Babiker, a resident of the capital’s east, told AFP.
Since war erupted on April 15 between army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, nearly 7,500 people have been killed, according to a conservative estimate from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
Civilians and aid workers have warned that the real toll is far higher, as many of those injured or killed never make it to hospitals or morgues.
A committee of volunteer pro-democracy lawyers on Sunday said the fighting in Khartoum since Friday had killed dozens of civilians in “continued disregard for international humanitarian law.”
“We are working to determine the number of civilian victims” of “arbitrary shelling,” the group said in a statement.
The war in Sudan has decimated already fragile infrastructure, shuttered 80 percent of the country’s hospitals and plunged millions into acute hunger.
More than five million people have been displaced, including 2.8 million who have fled the relentless air strikes, artillery fire and street battles in Khartoum’s densely-populated neighborhoods.
Millions who could not or refused to leave Khartoum remain in the city, where water, food and electricity are rationed.
The violence has also spread to the western region of Darfur, where ethnically-motivated attacks by the RSF and allied militias have triggered renewed investigations by the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes.
There has also been fighting in the southern Kordofan region, where witnesses again reported on Sunday artillery fire exchanged between the army and the RSF in the city of El-Obeid.
Fire engulfs an 18-story tower block in Sudan’s capital as rival forces battle for the 6th month
https://arab.news/cefjt
Fire engulfs an 18-story tower block in Sudan’s capital as rival forces battle for the 6th month
- Greater Nile Petroleum Oil Company Tower caught fire Sunday during clashes between Sudanese army, RSF
- Online footage of the blaze showed clouds of dark smoke rising from the burnt-out glass-paneled tower
‘No one to back us’: Arab bus drivers in Israel grapple with racist attacks
- “People began running toward me and shouting at me, ‘Arab, Arab!’” recalled Khatib, a Palestinian from east Jerusalem
JERUSALEM: What began as an ordinary shift for Jerusalem bus driver Fakhri Khatib ended hours later in tragedy.
A chaotic spiral of events, symptomatic of a surge in racist violence targeting Arab bus drivers in Israel, led to the death of a teenager, Khatib’s arrest and calls for him to be charged with aggravated murder.
His case is an extreme one, but it sheds light on a trend bus drivers have been grappling with for years, with a union counting scores of assaults in Jerusalem alone and advocates lamenting what they describe as an anaemic police response.
One evening in early January, Khatib found his bus surrounded as he drove near the route of a protest by Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
“People began running toward me and shouting at me, ‘Arab, Arab!’” recalled Khatib, a Palestinian from east Jerusalem.
“They were cursing at me and spitting on me, I became very afraid,” he told AFP.
Khatib said he called the police, fearing for his life after seeing soaring numbers of attacks against bus drivers in recent months.
But when no police arrived after a few minutes, Khatib decided to drive off to escape the crowd, unaware that 14-year-old Yosef Eisenthal was holding onto his front bumper.
The Jewish teenager was killed in the incident and Khatib arrested.
Police initially sought charges of aggravated murder but later downgraded them to negligent homicide.
Khatib was released from house arrest in mid-January and is awaiting the final charge.
Breaking windows
Drivers say the violence has spiralled since the start of the Gaza war in October 2023 and continued despite the ceasefire, accusing the state of not doing enough to stamp it out or hold perpetrators to account.
The issue predominantly affects Palestinians from annexed east Jerusalem and the country’s Arab minority, Palestinians who remained in what is now Israel after its creation in 1948 and who make up about a fifth of the population.
Many bus drivers in cities such as Jerusalem and Haifa are Palestinian.
There are no official figures tracking racist attacks against bus drivers in Israel.
But according to the union Koach LaOvdim, or Power to the Workers, which represents around 5,000 of Israel’s roughly 20,000 bus drivers, last year saw a 30 percent increase in attacks.
In Jerusalem alone, Koach LaOvdim recorded 100 cases of physical assault in which a driver had to be evacuated for medical care.
Verbal incidents, the union said, were too numerous to count.
Drivers told AFP that football matches were often flashpoints for attacks — the most notorious being those of the Beitar Jerusalem club, some of whose fans have a reputation for anti-Arab violence.
The situation got so bad at the end of last year that the Israeli-Palestinian grassroots group Standing Together organized a “protective presence” on buses, a tactic normally used to deter settler violence against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
One evening in early February, a handful of progressive activists boarded buses outside Jerusalem’s Teddy Stadium to document instances of violence and defuse the situation if necessary.
“We can see that it escalates sometimes toward breaking windows or hurting the bus drivers,” activist Elyashiv Newman told AFP.
Outside the stadium, an AFP journalist saw young football fans kicking, hitting and shouting at a bus.
One driver, speaking on condition of anonymity, blamed far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir for whipping up the violence.
“We have no one to back us, only God.”
‘Crossing a red line’
“What hurts us is not only the racism, but the police handling of this matter,” said Mohamed Hresh, a 39-year-old Arab-Israeli bus driver who is also a leader within Koach LaOvdim.
He condemned a lack of arrests despite video evidence of assaults, and the fact that authorities dropped the vast majority of cases without charging anyone.
Israeli police did not respond to AFP requests for comment on the matter.
In early February, the transport ministry launched a pilot bus security unit in several cities including Jerusalem, where rapid-response motorcycle teams will work in coordination with police.
Transport Minister Miri Regev said the move came as violence on public transport was “crossing a red line” in the country.
Micha Vaknin, 50, a Jewish bus driver and also a leader within Koach LaOvdim, welcomed the move as a first step.
For him and his colleague Hresh, solidarity among Jewish and Arab drivers in the face of rising division was crucial for change.
“We will have to stay together,” Vaknin said, “not be torn apart.”
