By Hend Salama Abo Helow / Truthout
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.
Somehow, our genocide has tragically overshadowed the Sudanese one. To some extent, the international media have seemed to give more attention to Gaza’s plight than Sudan’s. Yet no genocide is less than another, and no blood is worth more than another. Empathy, joint solidarity, and activism should never be conditional or selective — never based on the victim’s identity, race, religion, or color.
Sudan has a long history of standing up for Palestine and supporting our unalienable right to liberation and self-determination. Back in 2020, Sudanese people marched against their own government for signing on to the Abraham Accords and normalizing ties with Israel.
The fall of El Fasher into the hands of the RSF coincided with the announcement of Gaza’s fragile ceasefire in October 2025. We breathed a sigh of relief that our bloodshed had come to an end and pledged not to allow it to happen again — not to us, nor to others — yet we were struck by the fact that Sudan’s suffering had plunged into a graver pattern of erasure.
Decades ago, in the wake of the Holocaust, the world shouted “never again,” but this vow has been broken over and over in cruel, unfathomable ways. And when we, ourselves, cried it — “never again” — we wished it to truly mean never again.
But Sudan’s counterrevolution, in which foreign powers entrench their own interests, has shattered any faint hope and exposed the moral decay that has never been repaired in the wake of Gaza’s genocide — a decay that reveals how fragile the world’s promise is, allowing another genocide to escalate, choosing silence over stopping the carnage time and time again.
Yet this time, it is not only the livestreamed atrocities in Gaza that are being censored, sanitized, and carefully curated to obfuscate the truth — it is also those in Sudan. I have come across hundreds, if not thousands, of videos emerging from Sudan, many of them filmed by RSF fighters themselves, documenting their newly invented methods of brutal killing and degradation. I panicked as if I were in that scene. My heart thrashed, my breath shrank, and tears streamed down. All the videos shared by Israeli forces — boasting of their ability to wreak havoc beyond repair, to torture Gazans beyond imagination, and to kill on a wholesale scale — flashed through my mind.
Other videos were pleas from Sudanese people, calling on the world’s conscience, begging those in power to stop the killing and to allow the entry of medicine, food, and humanitarian supplies. I felt helpless, but responsible toward them — as we are the very ones who can truly feel them. The hunger, while loaded trucks piled up at the borders; the indifference, while our pleas relentlessly echo; and the dread overflowing from the eyes speak louder than words ever can.
Sudan is Gaza, and Gaza is Sudan; to say otherwise is to believe in the flimsy nuances that are stitched together by the same hands that planted this apartheid.
Every horrific memory, every overwhelming image, every untold story and unspoken grief mirrors both Sudan and Gaza: Every mother burying the remains of her children; every mother shielding her children with her bare hands from falling bombs; every mother dying to feed her little ones. Every father digging through rubble with his own hands to retrieve the bodies of those he loved. Every child whose world collapsed, leaving them alone. Every family fleeing death only to meet it again. Every aching stomach, every trembling one, every amputated limb, hollow eye, and stunted body.
In death, and hopefully in survival, Sudan resembles Gaza. None of us is free until all of us are free.
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Hend Salama Abo Helow
Hend Salama Abo Helow is a researcher, writer and medical student at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. She is also a writer with We Are Not Numbers and has published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Institute for Palestinian Studies, Mondoweiss and Al Jazeera. She believes in writing as a form of resistance, a silent witness to atrocities committed against Palestinians, and a way to achieve liberation.