26 Nov 2025 | Israel, News, Sudan, United Arab Emirates
In what critics see as a major blow to freedom of expression, Israel has banned protests against its ally the United Arab Emirates over the latter’s sponsorship of a militia perpetrating atrocities in Sudan.
“This is a very, very grave step that lessens freedom of protest and freedom of speech,” said Oded Feller, director of the legal department at the Association for Civil Rights (ACRI) in Israel.
The ban is causing consternation among the 6,000-strong Sudanese community in Israel. Many of them lost relatives or friends at the hands of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia in their home country.
In a letter from Maya Vinkler, a police legal adviser in Tel Aviv, to Feller dated 20 November and seen by Index on Censorship, Vinkler refers back to a hearing before the High Court of Justice the previous day during which judges deliberated on an ACRI petition on behalf of Sudanese community activist Anwar Suliman. The petition sought to overturn a police decision based on secret evidence that it would be a “severe threat to state security and public well-being” to hold a protest outside the UAE embassy in the Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya.
“We wanted the Israeli public to know who is responsible for this slaughter and that it is not just the militia,” Suliman said. The UAE has close ties with Israel, establishing diplomatic relations through the US-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020 – and making its first public purchase of Israeli weaponry a year later.
The country is also a major regional player, but after the RSF’s mass killings of civilians in and around the city of El Fasher in Darfur last month its international reputation is declining. Abu Dhabi insists that it does not back the RSF, but the disclaimer is contradicted by “evidence showing the Gulf state has provided munitions, drones and other equipment to the RSF,” according to a 15 November report in the Washington Post.
The deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council and a representative of the foreign ministry attended the high court session.
“In the open part of the discussion it was stressed that there is a danger of harm to state security and harm to foreign relations,” Feller said.
Then the courtroom was cleared so that the deputy head of the National Security Council and “possibly other officials” could brief the judges in secrecy.
When Feller was allowed back into the courtroom, the judges advised him to withdraw the petition. Feller says that since he did not want a negative ruling that would set a precedent, he agreed.
After this setback, Suliman and Feller applied to the police to hold a protest in a park, with placards and speeches, focusing on candle lighting and tributes to friends and relatives killed by the RSF. “I have a friend I studied with for four years and he was killed,” said Suliman “Everyone in the community has someone who was killed there whether it’s a family member or a friend.”
He told Index the Sudanese community just wants to protest the UAE role in Sudan, just as communities in Western cities including London have done recently.
Many in the Sudanese community in Israel have been in Israel for more than 10 years and fled after earlier massacres. According to Sigal Rozen, public policy coordinator of the Tel Aviv based Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, refugees from the Darfur genocide who had fled to Egypt in 2003 began crossing into Israel because of safety fears after a mass shooting incident by Egyptian security forces outside the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in December 2005. After people saw it was possible to survive in Israel and that they were wanted by the labour market, relatives and friends joined them, she says. This continued until 2012, when Israel erected a fence on the border. According to government figures, 300 people succeeded in crossing into Israel despite the fence during the following three years. The Tel Aviv area has the largest number of Sudanese in Israel. They work mostly in cleaning streets, gardening, and in restaurants and hotels. They do not have work permits, but as part of a 2011 court case, authorities promised they would not enforce the law against them
In previous years, the Sudanese community has been allowed to protest outside the US, UK, EU, Egyptian and Rwandan embassies in Israel. Suliman stresses they were all peaceful demonstrations.
Zakaria Bongo, an English teacher and construction worker from Darfur who has been in Israel for 14 years, is worried that his missing friend Saif Omer may have been killed by the RSF while trying to escape the militia’s capture of El-Fasher. “When the genocide happened last time, people said never again but right now never again is happening in front of the whole world,” he said. “All the world is silent about the crimes so we have to get our voices out.”
But Israel apparently does not want that to happen. The police not only rejected holding the park protest, on 20 November, they informed Feller that they will not grant permits for any protests about the renewed genocide anywhere in Israel. Vinkler claimed in a letter to Feller that during the hearing the judges “accepted the state’s position not to permit protests in the matter of the genocide in Sudan at this time throughout the country.”
Feller says this is a misrepresentation of what happened in the court and amounts to a power grab by the police. He says its decision makers could now, instead of weighing permit applications on their merits “act as the long arm of the national security council and the foreign ministry.”
Vinkler specified in her letter that it did not matter where a demonstration would be held or its “character” it would still be denied a permit. Referring to the closed-door part of the court hearing, Vinkler wrote that the ban against the protest outside the UAE embassy was based on information showing the demonstration “was liable to harm the foreign relations of the state of Israel and state security.”
Alon Liel, former director general of the Israeli foreign ministry, is sharply critical of the police ban. “When you adopt standards of dictatorships and assist dictatorships in committing crimes it shows you might be on the way to losing your democracy,” he said.
The UAE and Israeli foreign ministries did not respond to queries for this article.
10 May 2024 | Africa, News, Sudan
Atar, a digital magazine distributed via email and WhatsApp, first came to my attention late last October. I was in a dimly lit New York cafe, warmed by the company of a group of Sudanese diaspora; artists, activists, journalists, nursing hot teas and wounded souls. As it often does, the question of obtaining high quality Sudani news bubbled up. “Have you heard about Atar yet?’ someone asked. I hadn’t, yet. But this interaction was instructive. With their formal website still under construction, word-of-mouth was one of the main ways this weekly Arabic (bi-monthly English) magazine was being found.
An initiative of the non-for-profit Sudan Facts Center for Journalism Services – founded by veteran journalist Arif Elsaui – Atar began publishing on 12 October 2023, six months into the war against civilians in Sudan. Co-managing director Amar Jamal told Index it was a project borne of necessity.
“We had been talking about theory for a long time,” Jamal said. “But with the current situation, we realised there won’t be any more media outlets in Sudan left.”
Sudan Facts Center had been running fellowships for young professional journalists, but the crisis spurred them into pushing forward with their greater ambitions. “If we were going to wait until the perfect conditions, we would be waiting a long time. Let us start, and improve as we go along,” Jamal noted.
Since October, the Atar team has produced 28 Arabic editions and four in English. Inspired by The Continent, another popular African digital news magazine, Atar – with the tagline “Sudan in Perspective” – is currently distributed through Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal and email.
“There hasn’t been a day when our distribution list hasn’t grown,” Jamal said.
Stories range from investigations into “Sudan’s labyrinth of torture centres” to the stories of those fleeing the war north through Egypt. Early editions reported on the daily experiences of Sudanese people during the conflict, how they “eat, drink and sleep” and their “daily heroism”, while more recent releases focus on the mutual aid infrastructure keeping people alive.
Not only was the content of the story important to get right, Jamal said, but the voice and tone of the publication was given thorough consideration.
“We stay away from tragic language. While we are writing about death, we write about it with heroism.” Not necessarily out of a desire to give readers hope, “but to give people an encouraging word”.
Atar began with three editors in Nairobi – Arif Elsaui, Amar Jamal and Mohammed Alsadiq – and four correspondents. The first releases were focused on the written word, delivering vital information via dense blocks of text, not unlike the traditional Sudanese newspaper. But this model changed after the team took stock 10 weeks into the project. Over the new year period, “we took a break to review the structure and design, expand our pool of reporters, institutionalise the project so it wouldn’t fail,” Amar said.
Today, Atar is delivered by 24 reporters and seven editors. The growth is palpable, not only in the range of stories, but in their design. The structure and voice of Atar is unique, deliberately so. “This is not a newspaper, delivering daily stories,” Amar makes clear. Atar is focused on analysis, curation, about showing the verification and the context for your average reader to make sense of unfolding events.
“The need for a newspaper has changed in the age of social media,” said Jamal, noting that in an age of camera phones, the recording of events has been democratised.
“What is needed now is the verification and context. That is our ambition. Respecting the intellect of the Sudanese reader, and presenting material that yes, might be difficult, but it has value. The value it has is in its truth.”
Atar is providing a home for fact-based news in a prohibitive information landscape. There are few players in Sudan today, fewer still after the state suspended operations of three satellite channels this April, Saudi state-owned broadcasters Al Arabiya and Al Hadath and UAE-owned Sky News Arabia.
“All of the correspondents that we began with have had to leave the country,” Amar admitted. “It’s very difficult to write from the inside.” But difficult is not impossible, and Atar consistently manages to publish original stories from the ground.
“Sometimes, stories are written under the Atar byline to protect the journalist,” Jamal said, describing how their local correspondents find ways to contact sources and file stories even in the most challenging circumstances. “Even when the internet was cut off,” he said. “You just adjust your investigative style.”
Atar’s popularity now means that they are regularly approached by writers, reporters and potential sources as an outlet for news, with some sending in fully written pieces for publication. Atar pride themselves on having an open-door policy, allowing anyone to submit material via phone or email, but only work that goes through their fact-checking system will be included in the magazine. The volume of engagement and interest is a “scream from the people,” Jamal said. Even a 14-year-old girl sent a piece with some news. These are people’s voices who are not heard and Atar wants to be a home for them.
Such grounded local reporting cultivates intense loyalty and support, such as in the case of the small island of Dagarti. “It has maybe only 300, 400 inhabitants,” Jamal said. “Nobody had written about these people before. But when our journalist went to do a follow-up story, she said the whole island waits for Thursday so they can read Atar.”
What next for Atar? The team has big ambitions. Their English-language edition was always part of the plan, because “it isn’t just the Sudanese reader that cares about Sudan.” They have recently moved into a new, larger office in Nairobi, with talk of a live studio arm, events and more. Their approach is experimental, and with enough funding in the bank for the moment, Jamal is excited about the future.
Jamal is not the only one. If this is what the Sudanese people can do in the most inhospitable of circumstances, imagine the possibilities once the war is over.
15 Feb 2024 | News, Sudan
The simple act of asking questions, or holding a camera, places a target on your back and hundreds have been attacked and even murdered
24 Nov 2021 | News, Sudan
Dozens of people gather around the tax administration building in Khartoum East, not too far from Sudan’s military HQ. They are not queuing to submit their returns. They are there in order to get access to the internet from the building’s Wi-Fi network that they have somehow managed to hack and get its password.
This scene of young people sitting around buildings in downtown Khartoum and Khartoum University, along with the tea ladies, was a common sight after the government cut off the internet following the coup against the country’s civilian government in which Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok, his cabinet and most of his advisors were placed under house arrest. They have since been reinstated – as has access to the internet – but it is clear who is really in charge.
These young WiFi-jackers give the password to newly arrived friends to enjoy a service that’s become very precious indeed.
Most of these people are young men and they have been doing this from the second week of the coup, when the Sudanese people woke up to the news of the arrest of the whole civilian government. Accompanying this was a near total blackout of the internet and the telephone network, which allowed only incoming international calls.
Kamal al-Zain, 45, is one of those who comes every day to the tax building from the outskirts of Khartoum.
“I used some cafes, but their internet is getting very expensive and it’s as great as this open one,” he told Index.
Al-Zain works at a private company in Khartoum but his work has stopped since the internet disappeared: “It has a direct impact on my work which depends on transferring money in dealing with customers using the internet.”
Al-Zain is also politically engaged with Sudan’s “resistance committees”. These pro-democracy neighbourhood-based committees emerged during the era of former dictator Omer al-Basher and organised the protests that toppled him in 2019. They have continued organising during the transitional period to Hamdok’s election and the protests against the coup of 25 October.
These committees, like most modern political bodies, normally use the internet to communicate and to announce for the schedules and dates of the protests on their social media sites.
“It’s become more difficult now to call for protests,” said al-Zain. “In the beginning I was afraid that the protests would be weak and that not many people would turn out, but I was wrong. We had to work on a strategy of door to door calling and sending text messages whenever the cellphone network is working.”
Many journalists working with online media outlets in Khartoum have lost their jobs following the internet blackout.
“I know some young journalists are now working as taxi drivers because their work has stopped,” said Haider el-Mukashfi, the general editor of al-Jareeda daily newspaper which stopped printing during the first week of the coup mainly because of the blackout but also because some key bridges get closed whenever there is a call for big protests, affecting its distribution.
The situation for companies has improved a little.
“You needed to let them know that you are a company not an individual to let you enjoy the service. We got our internet back with a new contract under the name of a new company,” said Majid al-Gaouni, the managing editor at the paper.
Shaza el-Shaikh, a journalist working for a Sudanese website, told Index on Censorship: “We are not working at the moment due to the internet cut off. They have decided to give me half of what they used to pay me.”
Others are using different tactic to get web access. I have had to book a room in a hotel in order to use its internet connection. Even that got cut off on 17 November when at least 14 protestors were killed by armed forces at a rally against the coup.
Communications in the country have been under military control since 2019 following the ousting of al-Basher. The military signed a power-sharing deal with the protest leaders in the autumn of that year and put the National Communications Authority (NCA) —the body that provides and regulates the internet—under their authority. It was previously under the remit of the ministry of information and communications.
The economic consequences of the blackout in Sudan are huge; some economic experts estimate that the telecommunications companies have been losing around US$6 million per day of which 40 per cent goes in VAT to the government.
Despite the seemingly huge loss for the government, cutting off the internet is the normal response whenever the government faces protests. It happened after the 3 June massacre in 2019 at a sit-in in protest at the army which resulted in more than a hundred deaths when bodies were dumped in the Nile, dozens were raped and many hundreds injured.
Protests that follow the government lifting subsidies and raising the prices of basics often lead to internet blackouts too.
It is not a new phenomenon.
In 2012 protests inspired by the Arab Spring Revolution began after an increase in bread and fuel prices and led to a blackout. However, the government unblocked some porn sites for days so that could distract youngsters hoping to keep them away from the protests; that didn’t work out. Normally, porn sites are blocked in Sudan due to sharia laws.
Al-Zain, along with many other people who had to travel long distances to just check their emails, are defiant.
“They think that we will stop our resistance by cutting off the internet, but they wrong, we have long experience of defying dictatorships for all those decades and we have created new ways to continue.”
