A Sudanese Army Drone Hit a Village Court Held Under a Tree in Darfur, Killing at Least 35
Civilians had gathered in Garra al-Zawaya to hear local disputes when the strike came just after midday Sunday. Among the dead were four tribal leaders, a rights group and witnesses said.
A drone strike hit a traditional community court in a village in North Darfur on Sunday afternoon, killing at least 35 people who had gathered to hear local disputes, according to the Sudanese rights group Emergency Lawyers.
The strike came at about 1 p.m. local time in Garra al-Zawaya, a village roughly 150 kilometers (93 miles) west of el-Fasher and near the town of Kabkabiya, in territory held by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Emergency Lawyers attributed the attack to drones operated by the Sudanese Armed Forces. The military has not commented.
The court was not a building in any conventional sense. "The court session was being held under a tree with the participation of local community leaders," a witness told the AFP news agency. These customary courts handle land arguments, livestock claims and tribal disputes, and in much of Darfur they are the only functioning justice system left after three years of war.
Casualty figures diverged through the day. Emergency Lawyers put the toll at 35 killed with several more wounded. The Sudan Tribune, citing eyewitnesses, reported at least 37 dead. The RSF's self-declared parallel government said 37 people were killed and 50 wounded, and called the attack "a horrific crime." Witnesses said four tribal leaders and two RSF commanders were among the dead — a detail that matters legally, because the presence of combatants at a civilian gathering is the kind of claim armies use to justify strikes after the fact.
Sudan's war began in April 2023 as a power struggle between RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and has since killed tens of thousands and displaced millions in what the United Nations calls the world's largest humanitarian crisis. Both sides have leaned heavily on drones as the fighting has ground on, using them to strike deep behind the other's lines without risking pilots or infantry. The United Nations documented more than 1,000 civilian deaths from drone strikes in Sudan in the first five months of 2026 alone.
North Darfur has been the war's cruelest theater. UN investigators concluded that RSF violence during the group's offensive on el-Fasher bore what they described as "the hallmarks of genocide," and the International Criminal Court said in July that it has concrete evidence tying RSF commanders to atrocities in the region.
Sunday's strike underscores a pattern that aid agencies have warned about for more than a year: as the front lines have hardened, the killing has shifted from battlefields to the places where civilians still congregate — markets, hospitals, aid distribution points, and now a court convened in the shade of a tree.
Originally reported by Al Jazeera.