Here in Gaza, We See Our Horror and Grief Mirrored in Sudan

When I was a child, I used to naively invert the colors of the Palestinian flag — green in the place of red, red where black should be, and black replacing the green. Back then, I didn’t realize that I was imagining an entirely different country: Sudan. Little did I know that one day both of us would be dragged into the same campaign of elimination, exposed to the same colonial ideologies, left unheeded until our erasure reached a never-returning edge.

Both of our countries have long been preyed upon for geopolitical interests. Sudan’s counterrevolution broke out in

April 2023, facilitated by the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and the United Kingdom — all for the sake of plundering its natural wealth and building invincible empires over its burnt ashes and spilled blood. In a world driven by power and profit rather than justice, Sudan’s rich resources — including its oil and gold reserves and its strategic location for maritime trade — made its onslaught “justified” enough for colonial powers to extract its treasures.

The same hidden intentions have haunted Gaza, where the race to extract its offshore gas accelerated shortly after October 7. Reports later confirmed that this attempt was futile, yet Israel’s and the U.S.’s colonial ambitions only extended further. By February 2025, President Trump openly declared his vision to

turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” paired with the proposal of forcibly displacing its people to other countries outside of Palestine.

These are not rhetorical lapses or one-off decisions. This is the systemic playbook used by the world’s dominant colonial powers to destabilize and dehumanize, and then divide, conquer, and occupy. In the lexicons of such colonial powers, the people of Gaza and Sudan are mere numbers. Our erasure will occupy the headlines for a while and then fall between the cracks of a new imperial project. Our existence stands as a deadlock before their settler-colonial regimes. Our ambitions, dreams, lives, names, and homes amount to nothing in the grinding wheel of change. That is why, in one way or another, we in Gaza are intertwined with the Sudanese people.

As the Rapid Support Forces, a Sudanese paramilitary group, unleashed their violence on El Fasher in 2023 — bringing the city under siege, starving its people, displacing more than 2 million, maiming bodies, torturing civilians to death, and raping dozens of people — Gaza was dragged into another wave of annihilation, carried out by Israel and backed by the United States. The architects of genocide may overtly differ, but covertly they are the same, thriving on the catastrophes inflicted on marginalized nations and driving them deeper. We, Gazans, were occupied with the daily battle of survival, with barely a flinching eye spared for anything outside Gaza’s borders — except Sudan’s plight. We thought of the Sudanese people amid the lulls of displacement, during the hunger riots inside our stomachs, and in the ghostly tales recounted by Palestinian prisoners who were released. We felt for the people in Sudan deeply, but we were shackled, prevented from stopping their carnage while, in the meantime, we were being exterminated ourselves.