At least 72 civilian gold miners were killed in an air strike targeting an artisanal mine in the disputed mountainous frontier between Sudan and Egypt, Sudanese monitors and local sources reported on Sunday, describing scenes of widespread devastation and chaos.
Emergency Lawyers, an independent Khartoum-based legal and human rights monitoring group documenting abuses during the ongoing Sudanese conflict, squarely blamed the Egyptian military for carrying out the lethal raid on Sudanese territory.
“Egyptian warplanes targeted civilian miners inside Sudanese territory in the northern Wadi area,” the legal group stated on social media platform X. “Preliminary documentation confirms that 72 civilians were killed in the strikes.”
Broadcaster Al Jazeera reported that the claims could not be independently verified immediately, and Egyptian authorities have not issued an official comment regarding the incident.
The deadly bombardment struck the mineral-rich Jabal al-Uqaidat ridge, marking the second major aerial assault on the same artisanal mining community this year. In June, a similar air strike in the vicinity claimed the lives of 23 workers, an incident also attributed by regional observers to Egyptian forces. Following that operation, the Egyptian military acknowledged conducting a “large-scale crackdown” against illicit cross-border gold mining inside its own territorial boundaries.
The frontier between the two nations has long remained a flashpoint of geopolitical and territorial friction, with both Cairo and Khartoum asserting sovereignty over parts of the mineral-endowed border zone, including the broader Halaib Triangle.
Photographs and video footage shared across social media and distributed by local civil society organizations showed dozens of bodies scattered across debris and rough desert terrain, with other casualties wrapped in makeshift burial shrouds. Surviving miners described hearing fighter jets before consecutive strikes tore through civilian encampments, leaving extensive carnage across the extraction shafts.
Sources: Emergency Lawyers (Sudan), Al Jazeera, and Regional Field Reports.