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Sudanese Need Protection, but Conditions Not Right for UN Force, Says Guterres

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia October 24, 2024. Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Pool via Reuters
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia October 24, 2024. Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Pool via Reuters
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Sudanese Need Protection, but Conditions Not Right for UN Force, Says Guterres

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia October 24, 2024. Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Pool via Reuters
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres attends a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia October 24, 2024. Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Pool via Reuters

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed to the Security Council on Monday for its support to help protect civilians in war-torn Sudan, but said conditions are not right for deployment of a UN force.

"The people of Sudan are living through a nightmare of violence — with thousands of civilians killed, and countless others facing unspeakable atrocities, including widespread rape and sexual assaults," Guterres told the 15-member council. War erupted in mid-April 2023 from a power struggle between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces ahead of a planned transition to civilian rule, and triggered the world's largest displacement crisis, Reuters reported.

"Sudan is, once again, rapidly becoming a nightmare of mass ethnic violence," Guterres said, referring to a conflict in Sudan's Darfur region about 20 years ago that led to the International Criminal Court charging former Sudanese leaders with genocide and crimes against humanity. The current war has produced waves of ethnically driven violence blamed largely on the RSF. The RSF killed at least 124 people in a village in El Gezira State on Friday, activists said, in one of the conflict's deadliest incidents.

The RSF has previously denied harming civilians in Sudan and attributed the activity to rogue actors.

Guterres acknowledged calls by Sudanese and human-rights groups for stepped-up measures to protect civilians, including the possible deployment of some form of impartial force, saying they reflected "the gravity and urgency of the situation."

"At present, the conditions do not exist for the successful deployment of a United Nations force to protect civilians in Sudan," he told the council, but added he was ready to discuss other ways to reduce violence and protect civilians.

"This may require new approaches that are adapted to the challenging circumstances of the conflict," Guterres said.

The UN says nearly 25 million people - half of Sudan's population - need aid as famine has taken hold in displacement camps and 11 million people have fled their homes. Nearly 3 million of those people have left for other countries.

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US Tracking Nearly 500 Incidents of Civilian Harm During Israel’s Gaza War

People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)
People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)
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US Tracking Nearly 500 Incidents of Civilian Harm During Israel’s Gaza War

People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)
People pray by the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip October 30, 2024. (Reuters)

US State Department officials have identified nearly 500 potential incidents of civilian harm during Israel's military operations in Gaza involving US-furnished weapons, but have not taken further action on any of them, three sources, including a US official familiar with the matter, said this week.

The incidents - some of which might have violated international humanitarian law, according to the sources - have been recorded since Oct. 7, 2023, when the Gaza war started. They are being collected by the State Department's Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, a formal mechanism for tracking and assessing any reported misuse of US-origin weapons.

State Department officials gathered the incidents from public and non-public sources, including media reporting, civil society groups and foreign government contacts.

The mechanism, which was established in August 2023 to be applied to all countries that receive US arms, has three stages: incident analysis, policy impact assessment, and coordinated department action, according to a December internal State Department cable reviewed by Reuters.

None of the Gaza cases had yet reached the third stage of action, said a former US official familiar with the matter. Options, the former official said, could range from working with Israel's government to help mitigate harm, to suspending existing arms export licenses or withholding future approvals.

The Washington Post first reported the nearly 500 incidents on Wednesday.

The Biden administration has said it is reasonable to assess that Israel has breached international law in the conflict, but assessing individual incidents was "very difficult work," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters on Wednesday.

"We are conducting those investigations, and we are conducting them thoroughly, and we are conducting them aggressively, but we want to get to the right answer, and it's important that we not jump to a pre-ordained result, and that we not skip any of the work," Miller said, adding that Washington consistently raises concerns over civilian harm with Israel.

The administration of President Joe Biden has long said it is yet to definitively assess an incident in which Israel has violated international humanitarian law during its operation in Gaza.

John Ramming Chappell, advocacy and legal adviser at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, said the Biden administration "has consistently deferred to Israeli authorities and declined to do its own investigations."

"The US government hasn't done nearly enough to investigate how the Israeli military uses weapons made in the United States and paid for by US taxpayers," he said.

The civilian harm process does not only look at potential violations of international law but at any incident where civilians are killed or injured and where US arms are implicated, and looks at whether this could have been avoided or reduced, said one US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A review of an incident can lead to a recommendation that a unit needs more training or different equipment, as well as more severe consequences, the official said.

Israel's military conduct has come under increasing scrutiny as its forces have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the enclave's health authorities.

The latest episode of bloodshed in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict was triggered on Oct. 7, 2023, when Palestinian Hamas fighters attacked southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting 250 others, according to Israeli tallies.