On the morning of October 7, 2023, Monim Haroun woke up to a call from a friend in Sudan.

“The Janjaweed killed my brother,” his friend exclaimed. The Janjaweed was the Sudanese Arab militia responsible for mass killings, rapes, and displacement during the Darfur genocide in the 2000s.

A Sudanese refugee living in Jerusalem, Haroun was in Chad at the time, visiting a refugee camp run by his employer, refugee aid organization HIAS. He hadn’t yet seen what was happening in Israel and initially couldn’t understand what his friend was saying.

As Haroun began scrolling through the news and saw what was unfolding in Israel, he asked his friend if by Janjaweed, he had meant Hamas. Yes, the friend replied.

The friend’s brother was Adam Mohammed Barima, a Sudanese asylum seeker who was one of some 1,200 people killed by Hamas during the October 7 invasion of southern Israel. Barima had been working as a custodian in southern Israel, where he had lived for years after fleeing Darfur following the murder of his father in a widespread genocide largely carried out by the Janjaweed.

For the roughly 6,600 Sudanese asylum seekers living in Israel, Haroun said, Hamas is the Janjaweed.

“They felt that Hamas did exactly what the Janjaweed did in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains,” he said. For many of them, the Hamas-led attacks were a reminder of the traumas they had fled.

Almost immediately, Haroun said, he began to be inundated with calls from other Sudanese living in Israel. Many wanted his help to join the Israel Defense Forces so they could fight back.

“When they couldn’t do that, they went to volunteer to support the victims and communities attacked,” he said.

For many Sudanese refugees in Israel, the Hamas attacks were only one layer of heartbreak. Gutted by October 7 and its aftermath, they have also watched helplessly as another catastrophe has unfolded back home — a brutal civil war that has once again plunged Sudan into mass killing, starvation, and displacement.

Compounding the trauma has been the experience of seeing the international community take up the plight of Gazans suffering in war, while the world largely ignores the war crimes once again being visited upon their friends and family with impunity.

“There is no other conflict that I can think of that is taking as many civilian lives as the crisis in Sudan,” said Haroun, who fled Darfur at age 11 during the first genocide.

Refugees from Africa began to cross into Israel in large numbers in 2005, seeking safety after fleeing persecution in their homelands and the threat of deportation from Egypt.

Nearly all hailed from Eritrea, where men are often forced into indefinite military service with slavery-like conditions, and Sudan, where war and genocide killed an estimated 300,000 people and displaced 2.5 million between 2003 and 2008.

While Israel offered relative safety, most African asylum seekers were denied refugee status and instead given temporary visas that must be renewed every few months, preventing them from legally working. They experienced open hostility and discrimination from the public and politicians alike, who branded them as “infiltrators.”

By 2013, a fortified fence erected by Israel along its border with Egypt had halted the entry of asylum seekers altogether, effectively sealing off one of the only routes to safety for people fleeing genocide and authoritarianism.

Since April 2023, Sudan has been torn apart by fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, led by former Janjaweed commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. The renewed violence has unleashed what many now describe as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with mass killings, famine, and forcible displacements at scales that dwarf Gaza’s but........

© The Times of Israel