The top American and Emirati diplomat spoke Friday about the need to end the Sudan war, the US State Department said.
“The Secretary and the Foreign Minister continued discussions on our collective efforts to achieving a humanitarian ceasefire in Sudan,” State Department Principal Deputy Spokesperson Tommy Pigott said after a call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed.
(Novemeber 20, 2025)
Trump admitted that the devastating war between Sudan‘s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) was „not on my charts“ before Prince Mohammed bin Salman pushed him to get involved.
But Trump said he would now work to „stabilise“ the conflict with regional powers, notably including the United Arab Emirates, which denies accusations of backing the RSF with weapons and mercenaries.
Israeli and Emirati online networks have worked in tandem to shape narratives around Sudan and Gaza, targeting Sudan’s army even as RSF massacres mounted in El Fasher.
On the defence-industrial side, firms are expanding inside the UAE, tightening a two-way flow of money, tech, and intelligence. Israeli defence firm Controp is opening a UAE subsidiary making it the latest emblem of this deepening security embrace.
All the while, Emirati rulers boast of their „development model“ as a „shining example for the region“: authoritarian, anti-political, drenched in consumerism and spectacle.
It is a façade of progress built on repression. A mirage of modernity concealing a machinery of tyranny.
The memories of what happened in el-Fasher were difficult for her to put into words.
“The dead bodies were everywhere – in the streets, inside houses and at the gates of many houses,” Yahya told Al Jazeera. “Wherever you are in el-Fasher, you will see dead bodies scattered.”
Her testimony is one of several accounts from people who fled North Darfur’s capital after the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group fighting Sudan’s regular army, captured the city on October 26.
In Gaza, we are used to waking up to the sounds of explosions, counting the days between meals, and cycling constantly between fear and hope. We thought our pain was unlike any other in the world until we saw Sudan burning under the same silence. There, as here, people die from hunger and under rubble, cameras and lenses absent, as if pain in the Global South is not meant to be heard in the North.
In Sudan and Gaza, children are snatched from their mothers’ arms before they even know what safety feels like. Last Tuesday alone, some 460 people were reportedly killed by paramilitary forces in the city of El-Fasher. Estimates put the rate of displacement in Gaza at 90%; in Sudan, more than 14 million people have been displaced. Homes are destroyed, access to clean water is severely limited, food remains deeply scarce, and the wounded lie scattered on the ground without medical care, just as we witnessed in our small city on the Mediterranean coast.
Yet what hurts more than bombing or hunger is silence.
(November 2, 2025)
Days after Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) seized el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, in a violent assault that included the killing of more than 400 people at a hospital, aid groups warn that tens of thousands of civilians are at risk amid continuing violence, including some that may be trapped in el-Fasher and others harmed while fleeing.
(Novemebr 2, 2025)
A total of 70,894 people have been displaced since the RSF took control, it said.
However, less than 6,000 have made it to the nearest camp in Tawila, 65 kilometers (40 miles) away, said Shashwat Saraf, Sudan director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, which runs the camp.
Almost 1,000 people arrived in the last three days, he said.
“The numbers are still very few. We are not seeing the hundreds of thousands that we were expecting. If people are still in el-Fasher, it will be very difficult for them to survive,” he told The Associated Press by phone from Tawila.
“What is unfolding in El Fasher recalls the horrors Darfur was subjected to twenty years ago,” Mr. Fletcher said, referring to the atrocities of the early 2000s that shocked the world and eventually led to International Criminal Court indictments.
“But somehow today we are seeing a very different global reaction – one of resignation,” he continued. “This is also a crisis of apathy.”
“The Sudan crisis is, at its core, a failure of protection, and our responsibility to uphold international law,” Mr. Fletcher said. “Atrocities are committed with unashamed expectation of impunity…the world has failed an entire generation.”
(October 30, 2025)
The United States condemns in the strongest terms the horrific violence occurring in El Fasher. The situation is both tragic and appalling.
We have said this before, and we will say it again – the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias have committed genocide.
The RSF has and continues to systematically kill men and boys – even infants – and deliberately target women and children for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence. These crimes are ethnically motivated.
RSF militias are targeting civilians as they flee, killing innocent people escaping conflict, and preventing those who remain from accessing life-saving supplies.
The United States condemns these abhorrent atrocities in no uncertain terms. Those responsible should be held accountable, including through sanctions, as noted by the Sudan Sanctions Panel of Experts in its most recent report.
(…)
Colleagues, ending wars is a priority for President Trump, and the United States remains committed to working with our partners and other stakeholders to resolve the crisis.
Together, we are focused on securing an immediate humanitarian truce, halting external support, and advancing a transition to civilian governance.
(October 28, 2025)
British military equipment has been found on battlefields in Sudan, used by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group accused of genocide, according to documents seen by the UN security council.
(…)
Months after the UN security council first received material alleging that the UAE may have supplied British-made items to the RSF, new data indicates that the British government went on to approve further exports to the Gulf state for military equipment of the same type.
British engines made specifically for a type of UAE-manufactured armoured personnel carrier also appear to have been exported to the Emirates, despite evidence that the vehicles had been used in Libya and Yemen in defiance of UN arms embargos.
“They’re frequent and the logistics are transferred immediately to another aircraft that is on standby and is destined for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan through the neighbouring countries,” said Abdullahi, a senior Puntland Maritime Police Force (PMPF) commander at Bosaso Airport, who spoke to Middle East Eye using a different name for security reasons.
According to flight tracking data, satellite imagery, multiple local sources, and US and regional diplomats, the origin of these planes and their cargo is clear: the United Arab Emirates.
(…)
As MEE reported recently, Bosaso is connected to a ring of bases built and expanded by the UAE across the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea. The bases, on the islands of Mayun, Abd al-Kuri, Samhah; at the Somaliland port of Berbera and the Yemeni port of Mocha, are all on territory nominally controlled not by the UAE but its allies or clients.
Since the powerful paramilitary group made a major incursion into the city last week, the UN human rights office has received “horrendous accounts of summary executions, mass killings, rapes, attacks against humanitarian workers, looting, abductions and forced displacement,” said Seif Magango, spokesperson for the UN human rights office (OHCHR).
Speaking from Nairobi to journalists in Geneva, Mr. Magango said numerous testimonies had been received from residents who had fled in terror as the city fell, then “survived the threatening journey to Tawila, approximately 70 kilometres away” – a journey that takes three to four days on foot.
(October 28, 2025)
Middle East Eye has reviewed dozens of video clips and images allegedly taken in el-Fasher since the RSF assault began.
Some were published by the RSF itself; others emerged on social media, particularly Sudanese Telegram groups.
The footage depicts chaotic and bloody scenes, captured by triumphant RSF fighters. Investigations suggest the videos are new.
The Arabic dialect spoken is Sudanese – particularly Darfuri – and the fighters’ dress is consistent with members of the RSF.
(October 30, 2025)
Calls to boycott the United Arab Emirates and Emirati-linked companies are growing across social media, fuelled by anger over the Gulf state’s backing of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan’s devastating war.
The campaign – which had been circulating in Sudanese and diaspora circles for years – gained fresh momentum after the RSF seized the city of el-Fasher in North Darfur on 26 October.
(October 28, 2025)
Horrific stories of mass-atrocities committed by the RSF militia continue to emerge, along with the tens of thousands of civilians who have fled the North Darfur city of El Fasher in Sudan.
The agency has received reports of summary executions of civilians trying to escape what was the last Sudanese military government stronghold of El Fasher – with indications of ethnic motivations for killings – and of former combatants who have put down their weapons, which is prohibited under humanitarian law.
“The risk of further large-scale, ethnically motivated violations and atrocities in El Fasher is mounting by the day,” warned UN human rights chief Volker Türk.
“Urgent and concrete action needs to be taken to ensure the protection of civilians in El Fasher and safe passage for those trying to reach relative safety.”
Das sudanesische Ärztenetzwerk teilte mit, RSF-Kämpfer hätten nach ihrem Einmarsch in Al-Faschir am Sonntag Dutzende Zivilisten getötet und Krankenhäuser und andere Gesundheitseinrichtungen geplündert.
Das Darfur-Netzwerk für Menschenrechte berichtete von mehr als 1.000 teilweise willkürlichen Festnahmen.
However, sources told Middle East Eye that the UAE, which is the RSF’s most significant patron, refused to address the situation in el-Fasher, which has been under siege for over 500 days.
Anwar Gargash, the diplomatic adviser to the UAE president, has addressed the situation in Gaza during in an interview at the Reuters NEXT Gulf Summit in Abu Dhabi.
He said much work remains to ensure…
Trump‘s plan also calls for an international stabilisation force, and that was core to much of Thursday‘s discussions, including establishing a United Nations mandate for a peacekeeping force, officials said.
Diplomats said a number of countries had expressed interest in taking part, including Indonesia, which was represented on Thursday, but also Italy and Azerbaijan.
The meeting in France involves France, Germany and the UK, known as the E3, plus Spain and is expected to last around two hours.
Representatives from what is known as the Arab Quint are also there – Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan.
(…)
Sir Tony is to sit on President Trump’s Board of Peace – part of the intended architecture of the peace plan.
Eight Arab and Muslim nations released a statement on Monday backing US President Donald Trump‘s plan to end Israel‘s genocide in Gaza and establish an international peace keeping force there.
The countries are: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan.
The meeting was convened at the invitation of the United States. The ministers have engaged in extensive consultations on the conflict in Sudan, recalling that it has provoked the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and poses grave risks to regional peace and security.
The ministers committed to the shared set of principles with regard to ending the conflict in Sudan:
The conflicting parties of Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia have committed war crimes and atrocities since mid-April 2023. On September 9, 2025, the UN Human Right Council submitted a report documenting that dozens of detainees have reportedly killed due to torture and the systematic deprivation of food and medical treatment since June.
It has been estimated that the war claimed the lives of 150,000 people by June 2024. As of July 2025, 12 million people had been forced to flee their homes, including 7.7 million internally displaced persons (IDPs)—more than half of whom are children, said Migration Policy Institute on July 17, 2025.
Here is the full text of the joint statement:
The US Department of Commerce has published a list of companies that help the Russian Federation circumvent sanctions and for which they will introduce next week a practically complete ban on the export of goods to the United States, the department’s website reported.
The new export restrictions, which will come into force on September 16, are being introduced against 23 companies from China, three firms from Turkey, two from the UAE, one company each from India, Singapore and Taiwan.
During the call, the UAE and French presidents emphasized the importance of intensified international efforts to advance the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the two-state solution, viewing it as the path to achieving security and stability in the Middle East. They also reaffirmed their rejection of any Israeli attempts to annex the West Bank or parts of the occupied Palestinian territories or to forcibly displace Palestinians, warning that such actions undermine regional stability and threaten the principle of a two-state solution in line with international legitimacy.
The incident, reported by Israeli broadcaster KAN, has not elicited immediate responses from either the UAE or Israeli foreign ministries.
This development underscores growing tensions and the fragile nature of regional relations as the situation continues to unfold.
Regional leaders are rushing to Qatar in the wake of Israel’s deadly strike on Doha in a show of support.
Jordan’s Crown Prince Hussein and UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed are expected to land in the Qatari capital today, Reuters reported.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is scheduled to follow on Thursday, underscoring the gravity of Israel’s attack and the regional outrage it has provoked.
(today)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has backed away from putting West Bank annexation on the government’s agenda after the United Arab Emirates warned that any such move would cross a “red line” and threaten the Abraham Accords.
The meeting, scheduled for Thursday, will instead address the deteriorating security situation in the territory as international attention turns toward possible recognition of a Palestinian state at the upcoming UN General Assembly.
(September 3, 2025)
Senior Emirati officials warned top Trump administration officials against Israeli moves to apply sovereignty over parts of the West Bank, a source familiar with the details of the discussions told The Jerusalem Post.
„This would destroy the Abraham Accords,“ the Emirati officials warned, adding: „Do not allow Israel to annex parts of the West Bank.“
(July 31, 2025)
This is a continuation of the Kingdom‘s joint humanitarian efforts to support the Palestinians amid the difficult circumstances facing the Gaza Strip.
They reached consensus on these fundamental principles in general terms. They plan rapid implementation, beginning with Gaza warfare termination.
1. Gaza hostilities will conclude within two weeks, ending conditions will encompass four Arab nations (including Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) to administer the Gaza Strip, replacing the murderous Hamas terrorist organization. The remaining Hamas leadership will face exile to other countries, while the hostages gain freedom……