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War & Peace
ICC Collecting War Crimes Evidence Against Sudanese Militia After Darfur Massacre
The court said the actions of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces, who are backed by a US ally in the UAE, "may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."
Nov 04, 2025
The International Criminal Court said it is collecting and preserving evidence of war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region following a massacre committed by a militia group and amid reports of widespread starvation.
In a statement published Monday, the ICC—the international body charged with prosecuting crimes against humanity—expressed "profound alarm and deepest concern over recent reports emerging from El-Fasher about mass killings, rapes, and other crimes" allegedly committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which breached the city last week.
According to the Sudan Doctors Network (SDN), a medical organization monitoring the country's brutal civil war, the militants slaughtered more than 1,500 people in just three days after capturing El-Fasher, among them more than 460 people who were systematically shot at the city's Saudi Maternity Hospital.
The ICC said that "such acts, if substantiated, may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute," the court's founding treaty, which lays out the definitions for acts including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
The court said it was "taking immediate steps regarding the alleged crimes in El-Fasher to preserve and collect relevant evidence for its use in future prosecutions."
The announcement comes shortly following a new report from the UN-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the world's leading authority on hunger crises, which found that famine has been detected in El-Fasher and the town of Kadugli in Sudan's South Kordofan province. Twenty other localities in the two provinces—which have seen some of the civil war's worst fighting—are also in danger of famine, according to the report.
The two areas have suffered under siege from the RSF paramilitary, which has cut off access to food, water, and medical care. The IPC says it has led to the "total collapse of livelihoods, starvation, extremely high levels of malnutrition and death."
According to the UN's migration authority, nearly 37,000 people have been forced to flee cities across North Kordofan between October 26 and 31. They joined more than 650,000 displaced people who were already taking refuge in North Darfur's city of Tawila.
Sudan's civil war, which began in 2023, has created the world's largest humanitarian crisis, with potentially as many as 150,000 people killed since it began. Over 12 million people have been displaced, and 30.4 million people, over half of Sudan’s total population, are in need of humanitarian support.
The recent escalation of the crisis has led to heightened global scrutiny of RSF's chief financier, the United Arab Emirates. In recent days, US politicians and activists have called for the Trump administration to halt military assistance to the Gulf state, which it sold $1.4 billion in military aircraft in May.
On Tuesday, Emirati diplomats admitted for the first time that they "made a mistake" supporting the RSF as it attempted to undermine Sudan's transitional democratic government, which took power in 2019 after over three decades of rule by the Islamist-aligned dictator Omar al-Bashir. Those efforts culminated in a military coup in 2021 and an eventual power struggle for control over the country.
However, as Sudanese journalist Nesrine Malik wrote in The Guardian on Monday, the UAE "continues to deny its role, despite overwhelming evidence."
"The UAE secures a foothold in a large, strategic, resource-rich country, and already receives the majority of gold mined in RSF-controlled areas," Malik wrote. "Other actors have been drawn in, overlaying proxy agendas on a domestic conflict. The result is deadlock, quagmire, and blood loss that seems impossible to stem, even as the crisis unravels in full view."
"Sudan’s war is described as forgotten, but in reality it is tolerated and relegated," she continued. "Because to reckon with the horror in Sudan... is to see the growing imperialist role of some Gulf powers in Africa and beyond—and to acknowledge the fact that no meaningful pressure is applied to these powers, including the UAE, to cease and desist from supporting a genocidal militia because the UK, US, and others are close allies with these states."
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Ex-IDF Legal Chief Who Leaked Sde Teiman Rape Video Arrested After Going Missing
"Meanwhile, the soldiers seen sexually assaulting and abusing Palestinian detainees are still free," said one Palestinian observer.
Nov 03, 2025
Israel's former top military lawyer, who admitted to leaking a video apparently showing Israeli reserve soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman torture prison, was arrested late on Sunday following her disappearance most of the day.
After being reported missing Sunday morning, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Advocate General Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, 51, was found "safe and in good health" that evening following a massive search in the coastal area of Herzliya, Israeli police said. She was subsequently arrested and on Monday faced charges of fraud and breach of trust, abuse of office, obstruction of justice, and disclosure of information as a public servant.
Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned Friday and admitted that she "authorized the release" of video footage showing IDF reservists at Sde Teiman from a unit called Force 100 brutally attacking a Palestinian prisoner, who was allegedly sodomized with a metal baton while other soldiers held up shields to conceal the assault.
"I bear full responsibility for any material that was released to the media," Tomer-Yerushalmi wrote in her resignation letter, in which she explained that her motivation for leaking the footage was "to counter false propaganda" against her office by far-right figures who denied the torture as a "blood libel"—a common Israeli tactic used to falsely smear criticism as "antisemitic."
Citing fears that Tomer-Yerushalmi may have tried to kill herself during her disappearance on Sunday—which were matched by concerns that she could be in danger of assassination—Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Israel Prison Service (IPS) Chief Commissioner Kobi Yaakobi said they ordered her placed under increased prison supervision.
According to The Jerusalem Post, this means that Tomer-Yerushalmi will be forced to remain in her cell under the supervision of additional IPS guards and security cameras.
Former military prosecutor Matan Solomesh was also arrested Sunday night in connection with the leaked video.
"Meanwhile," Palestinian human rights activist Ihab Hassan noted on X, "the soldiers seen sexually assaulting and abusing Palestinian detainees are still free."
On July 4, 2024, members of Force 100 attacked the Palestinian prisoner for approximately 15 minutes behind riot shields so cameras could not see, leaving him hospitalized with a severe anal injury, ruptured bowel, broken ribs, and lung damage, according to Dr. Yoel Donchin, an Israeli physician at the facility.
Footage of the assault was aired on Israeli television following Tomer-Yerushalmi's leak. While human rights groups called for an investigation into the attack, Israeli leaders including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich furiously demanded a probe not to seek justice for the victim, but rather to find and punish whoever leaked the video.
After a group of alleged participants in the attack were subsequently arrested, a mob of far-right Israelis including senior government officials stormed a pair of military bases in an attempt to free the suspects. While many Israelis condemned the alleged rape, others rallied around the accused reservists.
Ben-Gvir called suspects "our best heroes" and slammed their arrest. Smotrich lauded them as "heroic warriors."
Many right-wing Israeli politicians, pundits, and others publicly argued that IDF troops should have free reign to rape, torture, and murder Palestinians as revenge for the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Former Palestinian prisoners, IDF soldiers, and Israeli medical professionals have all said they witnessed torture and other abuse of detainees at Sde Teiman and other facilities. Victims ranged in age from children to octogenarians.
Israeli physicians who served at Sde Teiman have described widespread severe injuries caused by 24-hour shackling of hands and feet that sometimes required amputations. Palestinians taken by Israeli forces have recounted rape and sexually assault by male and female soldiers, electrocution, maulings by dogs, denial of food and water, sleep deprivation, and other torture.
At least scores of detainees have died or been killed in Israeli custody, including one who expired after allegedly being sodomized with an electric baton. Many bodies of former Palestinian prisoners returned by Israel have shown signs of torture, execution, and mutilation.
The IDF said in February that it had filed charges against five reservists suspected of abusing Sde Teiman prisoners.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation in Gaza—was among those who condemned Tomer-Yerushalmi for exposing IDF abuse.
“This is perhaps the most severe public relations attack that the state of Israel has experienced since its establishment," the prime minister said Sunday, a statement that came amid ongoing deadly attacks against Palestinians during a 759-day genocide that's left at least 249,000 Gazans dead, maimed, or missing and many more forcibly displaced, sick, and starving, according to local officials and international rights groups.
While some observers believe that Tomer-Yerushalmi is a heroic whistleblower for leaking the Sde Teiman video, others noted that she has approved and supports Israel's genocidal actions in Gaza, pointing to her resignation letter's claim that "the IDF is a moral and law-abiding army."
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Echoes of Obama Libya Strikes as Trump Argues Boat Bombings Are Immune From War Powers Law
"It is a power grab in the service of killing people outside the law based solely on the president's own say so," said one expert.
Nov 03, 2025
The Trump administration reportedly told members of Congress that the president's deadly, unauthorized airstrikes on vessels in international waters can continue indefinitely, deploying a rationale that the Obama administration applied to its 2011 bombing of Libya.
The Washington Post reported Saturday that "T. Elliot Gaiser, head of the Trump administration's Office of Legal Counsel, made his remarks to a small group of lawmakers this week amid signs that the president may be planning to escalate the military campaign in the region, including potentially hitting targets within Venezuela."
Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the president has 60 days to terminate military operations not approved by Congress. The 60-day clock starts when the president notifies Congress of military action.
Monday marks the 60th day since Trump informed Congress of his first strike on a boat in the Caribbean in early September. The strike killed 11 people whom the administration accused without evidence of trying to smuggle drugs from Venezuela to the United States.
Trump has since authorized more than a dozen other strikes on boats in international waters, killing more than 60 people in what human rights organizations and United Nations experts have described as blatant violations of US and international law.
The Trump administration has told lawmakers that the US is engaged in "armed conflict" against drug cartels that the president has designated as "terrorist organizations."
But the White House is insisting that Trump's military actions in international waters are not constrained by the War Powers Resolution, claiming the operations "do not rise to the level of 'hostilities'" because the administration says American troops are not likely to be put in danger.
Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser at the State Department who now works at the International Crisis Group, observed Monday that the Trump administration's narrow definition of hostilities echoes "arguments made by the Obama administration in 2011 with respect to the military intervention in Libya."
"The Obama administration's interpretation of 'hostilities' was not well received, including by the US Congress," Finucane wrote, pointing to a May 18, 2011 letter that Republican senators sent to Obama accusing him of flouting the War Powers Resolution.
One of those GOP senators—Rand Paul of Kentucky—is backing a bipartisan war powers effort to prevent Trump from unilaterally and unlawfully attacking Venezuela.
Finucane stressed that the implications of the Trump administration's decision to interpret hostilities narrowly "are significant," noting that it paves the way for the US government to "continue its killing spree at sea, notwithstanding the time limits imposed by the War Powers Resolution."
"Second, the executive is arrogating to itself greater power over the use of force that constitutionally is the prerogative of Congress," Finucane added. "It is a power grab in the service of killing people outside the law based solely on the president's own say so."
On Saturday, Drop Site reported that the Trump administration has expanded its "drug cartel target list" to include sites inside Colombia and Mexico amid concerns that the president could soon attack Venezuela and launch an effort to overthrow the nation's president, Nicolás Maduro.
"At an Oval Office meeting in early October, Trump administration officials and top generals discussed escalating the pressure on Venezuela to go beyond the semi-regular attacks on boats in the Caribbean," the outlet reported. "The discussed plans include striking on land inside Venezuela... The same October 2 meeting included a previously reported directive from President Trump, who dialed his special envoy Richard Grenell into the call, telling him to cut off diplomatic communications with Maduro."
Asked during a newly aired "60 Minutes" interview if he believes Maduro's days as Venezuela's president are "numbered," Trump responded, "I would say yeah."
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Lancet Study Shows Over 3 Million Years of Human Life Lost in Israeli Assault on Gaza
"To speak of 3 million years of human life erased is to confront the true scale of this atrocity—generations of children, parents, and families wiped out," said the head of a US advocacy group.
Nov 03, 2025
As Israeli forces continued to violate a fragile ceasefire agreement with Hamas, killing more people in the Gaza Strip on Monday, the largest Muslim civil rights group in the United States renewed calls for cutting off military aid to Israel, citing a new study in The Lancet.
"This new Lancet study offers more evidence of the catastrophic human cost of Israel's genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people," Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement.
The correspondence published Friday by the famed British medical journal was submitted by Colorado State University professor Sammy Zahran, an expert in health economics, and Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian surgeon teaching at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.
Zahran and Abu-Sittah provided an estimate of the number of years of life lost, based on an official death toll list published by the Gaza Ministry of Health at the end of July, which included the age and sex of 60,199 Palestinians. They noted that the list is "restricted to deaths linked explicitly to actions by the Israeli military, excluding indirect deaths resulting from the ruin of infrastructure and medical facilities, restriction of food and water, and the loss of medical personnel that support life."
The pair calculated life expectancies in the state of Palestine—Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem—by sex for all ages, using mortality and population data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs for 2022. They estimated that a total of 3,082,363 life-years were lost in Gaza as a result of the Israeli assault since October 7, 2023.
"We find that most life-years lost are among civilians, even under the relaxed definition of a supposed combatant involving all men and boys of possible conscription age (15–44 years)," the paper states. "More than 1 million life-years involving children under the age of 15 years... have been lost."
CAIR's Awad said, "To speak of 3 million years of human life erased is to confront the true scale of this atrocity—generations of children, parents, and families wiped out. It is a deliberate effort to destroy a people."
Israel faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice over its conduct in Gaza, and the International Criminal Court last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
"The United States and the international community must end their complicity by halting all military aid to Israel and supporting full accountability for these crimes under international law," Awad argued.
A report published last month by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the Costs of War Project at Brown University found that the Biden and Trump administrations provided at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel since the start of the war.
Federal law prohibits the US government from providing security assistance to foreign military units credibly accused of human rights abuses. The Washington Post last week reported on a classified State Department document detailing "many hundreds" of alleged violations by Israeli forces in Gaza that are expected to take "multiple years" to review.
With President Donald Trump seeking a Nobel Peace Prize, the US helped negotiate the current ceasefire, which began on October 10, after over two years of devastating retaliation for the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel. The head of Gaza's Government Media Office said Monday that Israeli forces have committed at least 194 violations of the agreement.
As of Sunday, the ministry's death count was at 68,865, with at least 170,670 people wounded. Previously published research, including multiple studies in The Lancet, has concluded that the official tally is likely a significant undercount.
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