PORT SUDAN: A Sudanese military air strike on a north Khartoum mosque killed seven civilians on Friday, pro-democracy lawyers said, in a toll also confirmed by an activists’ committee.
“The attack occurred as worshippers were leaving the mosque” after Friday noon prayers, said the Emergency Lawyers, who have been documenting human rights abuses during the 19-month war between Sudan’s regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
The local resistance committee, one of hundreds of volunteer groups across Sudan delivering frontline aid during the war, confirmed the death toll and said “a number of wounded” had also been transported for treatment.
The attack was “part of a series of arbitrary military assaults that do not discriminate between civilians and military targets,” the lawyers said in a statement, calling the strike a “crime against humanity and a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.”
Both the army and the RSF have been accused of deliberately targeting civilians and indiscriminately shelling residential areas.
Friday’s attack occurred on a mosque in Khartoum North, also known as Bahri, which has been under near-total control of the RSF since the war began in April 2023.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the war and more than eight million internally uprooted in what the United Nations calls the world’s largest displacement crisis, with another three million having fled abroad.
Air strike on Khartoum mosque kills 7: Sudan lawyers’ group
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Air strike on Khartoum mosque kills 7: Sudan lawyers’ group
- “The attack occurred as worshippers were leaving the mosque” after Friday noon prayers, said the Emergency Lawyers
- Friday’s attack occurred on a mosque in Khartoum North, also known as Bahri
US lawmakers press Israel to probe strike on reporters in Lebanon
- “The IDF has made no effort, none, to seriously investigate this incident,” Welch said
- Collins called for Washington to publicly acknowledge the attack in which an American citizen was injured
WASHINGTON: Several Democratic lawmakers called Thursday for the Israeli and US governments to fully investigate a deadly 2023 attack by the Israeli military on journalists in southern Lebanon.
The October 13, 2023 airstrike killed Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and wounded six other reporters, including two from AFP — video journalist Dylan Collins and photographer Christina Assi, who lost her leg.
“We expect the Israeli government to conduct an investigation that meets the international standards and to hold accountable those people who did this,” Senator Peter Welch told a news conference, with Collins by his side.
The lawmaker from Collins’s home state of Vermont said he had been pushing for answers for two years, first from the administration of Democratic president Joe Biden and now from the Republican White House of Donald Trump.
The Israeli government has “stonewalled at every single turn,” Welch added.
“With the Israeli government, we have been extremely patient, and we have done everything we reasonably can to obtain answers and accountability,” he said.
“The IDF has made no effort, none, to seriously investigate this incident,” Welch said, referring to the Israeli military, adding that it has told his office its investigation into the incident is closed.
Collins called for Washington to publicly acknowledge the attack in which an American citizen was injured.
“But I’d also like them to put pressure on their greatest ally in the Middle East, the Israeli government, to bring the perpetrators to account,” he said, echoing the lawmakers who called the attack a “war crime.”
“We’re not letting it go,” Vermont congresswoman Becca Balint said. “It doesn’t matter how long they stonewall us.”
AFP conducted an independent investigation which concluded that two Israeli 120mm tank shells were fired from the Jordeikh area in Israel.
The findings were corroborated by other international probes, including investigations conducted by Reuters, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders.
Unlike Welch’s assertion Thursday that the Israeli probe was over, the IDF told AFP in October that “findings regarding the event have not yet been concluded.”
