A drone struck a customary court session in the village of Garra al-Zawaya in North Darfur at about 1 p.m. local time on Sunday, killing at least 35 people, according to Emergency Lawyers, a Sudanese rights group [1]. The group attributes the strike to the Sudanese army. Al Jazeera's report carries no statement or denial from the army [1].
The people at the session had come, in the report's description, to "attend hearings on local cases and disputes" [1]. A witness told AFP: "The court session was being held under a tree with the participation of local community leaders" [1].
Among the dead, per the same account, were four tribal leaders and two commanders of the Rapid Support Forces, which controls the village [1]. That leaves 29 of the 35 dead undescribed by role, and none of the 35 is named in the report.
Every figure above rests on a single named source. Emergency Lawyers supplied the count, the attribution and the breakdown; the report contains no independent confirmation of the toll, no competing figure from any other party, and no army account of what it believed it was striking [1]. We are publishing a rights group's count as a rights group's count, which is a different thing from a verified death toll, and the distinction matters most in exactly this kind of case.
The village sits about 150 kilometres west of el-Fasher, which was the army's last stronghold in Darfur until the RSF took it after a bloody offensive in October last year [1]. UN investigators said the siege of el-Fasher bore "the hallmarks of genocide" [1]. Al Jazeera reported that the UN counted more than 1,000 civilians killed in drone strikes in the first five months of this year [1]. That is the context a strike on a village court lands in, and it is why a rights group is the entity doing the counting in the first place.
What was struck is the part that will decide how this is judged. A gathering that, by the same account, held both community leaders hearing local disputes and two RSF commanders is the hardest case the law of armed conflict handles, the one that turns on proportionality: what military advantage was anticipated, what civilian harm was expected, what precautions were taken beforehand. Answering any of that requires facts no party had put on the record by Sunday night. What is on the record is a count of 35, a location, an hour, and a description of the venue, which was a tree.
The four tribal leaders were, by the report's own description, the layer of authority a village of this kind uses to settle disputes without weapons. Twenty-nine other people who came to hear those disputes were killed alongside them. Neither figure moves until someone with records confirms or contests it, and no army response appears in the reporting available [1].
