At Least Seventy-Two Gold Miners Killed in Strike on Sudan
A monitoring group says an air raid on a gold mine near the disputed Sudan–Egypt border killed at least seventy-two civilian miners on Saturday. Emergency Lawyers, which documents atrocities in Sudan’s war, accuses Egyptian fighter jets of carrying out the strike inside Sudanese territory. Neither Egypt nor the Sudanese authorities has commented, and the toll is provisional.
This needs its caveats attached rather than buried. The accusation rests on one monitor, the attack cannot be independently verified, and no government has responded; the group’s own wording is that “Egyptian fighter jets targeted civilian miners in the northern Wadi area inside Sudanese territory” killing seventy-two, and that such acts “may constitute war crimes”. What gives the claim traction is a pattern rather than a confession. A strike on the same area in June killed twenty-three, after which Egypt’s military said it had acted within its own territory against illegal mining, detaining 223 people and seizing eighty-six tonnes of gold ore. The border itself is contested: both countries claim the Halaib Triangle. The wider context is a war that has killed more than 200,000 people since April 2023 and driven civilians into artisanal gold mining that funds both sides of it. Accounts differ slightly on location, one placing the mine in River Nile state and another at Jabal al-Uqaydat, though the incident, the toll and the monitor are the same. Watch for whether Cairo addresses the claim directly, having answered the June strike within days.