Sudan army court sentences RSF chief Hemedti to death in absentia, deepening a war without front lines

A court in Port Sudan sentenced paramilitary commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, known as Hemedti, and 15 other defendants to death in absentia on Sunday, 12 July 2026, after finding them responsible for the killing of a regional governor during the civil war between Sudan's army and the Rapid Support Forces, according to Agence France-Presse reporting carried by Africanews. The verdict, issued by a tribunal in the eastern Red Sea city that has served as the army's de facto wartime capital since fighting broke out in April 2023, underscores how Sudan's conflict has hardened into a contest between two parallel authorities, each with its own courts, its own currency arrangements, and its own foreign backers.

The court convicted the defendants on charges tied to the killing of a governor, whose identity the Africanews dispatch did not name. The sentence was handed down in absentia, a procedural default that the army's legal framing treats as a routine matter of the defendants being beyond the court's reach, and which the RSF treats as evidence that the entire proceeding is political theatre. Either way, the ruling extends a pattern in which both warring parties have used the courts they control to issue death sentences and asset seizures against opposing commanders, with limited effect on the battlefield and none on the international community's reluctance to treat either side as a government in waiting.

A war fought by proxy verdicts

Sudan's civil war began in April 2023, when long-simmering tension between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his then-deputy Hemedti broke into open combat in Khartoum. By the second quarter of 2026, the fighting has settled into a geographic split: the army holds the east, north, and central corridors including Port Sudan; the RSF holds much of Darfur and parts of Kordofan. The two sides have ceased pretending that a single sovereign legal order exists. The army prosecutes RSF commanders in its own courts; the RSF has, at various points, claimed authority over territories the army still contests.

The Port Sudan verdict is the latest in a series of death sentences the army-aligned judiciary has handed down against RSF figures since 2024. None has produced a surrender. None has unlocked a prisoner exchange. What the rulings do produce is a record that international prosecutors, including those at the International Criminal Court, can later point to as evidence of command responsibility and systematic targeting of civilians. The ICC has had an open docket on Darfur since the 2000s, and Hemedti himself was indicted in 2024 on charges related to ethnic violence in West Darfur, a separate track that continues to run in parallel to Sudan's domestic proceedings.

The politics of the courtroom

For the army, the value of a televised in absentia verdict is symbolic. It reframes a grinding war of attrition into a story of justice being administered. It also signals to Sudan's Gulf backers, particularly the United Arab Emirates, that the army's legal machinery is functional and that the RSF remains the side that needs to be brought to heel. The UAE has been repeatedly accused by UN panels of funnelling matériel to the RSF, a charge Abu Dhabi denies; the verdict gives Khartoum a fresh public document to wave at diplomats making the same accusation.

For the RSF, the verdict is grist for a counter-narrative: that the army is using the courts to launder political violence, and that the real question in Sudan is not who killed a governor but who is starving the population. Independent reporting from late 2025 and the first half of 2026 has documented famine conditions in RSF-held parts of Darfur, where humanitarian access has been choked off by both warring parties. A death sentence in Port Sudan does not put food in those markets.

What the verdict does not solve

The structural problem the verdict does not touch is that Sudan now has two armies, two legal systems, and two patron networks, with no negotiated political framework to unite them. Regional mediation efforts, led from time to time by the African Union, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and others, have produced communiqués but no ceasefire. The army insists on surrender as a precondition to talks; the RSF demands a civilian transitional arrangement that excludes Burhan. Each death sentence issued by either side tightens that deadlock rather than loosening it.

The counter-narrative that the verdict holds up better than its critics suggest rests on a narrower claim: that an established legal record of RSF abuses is a precondition to any eventual political settlement that includes accountability. That is a defensible reading. It does not, however, change the empirical reality that no verdict from a Port Sudan court has moved a single RSF brigade off a single ridge in Darfur, and that civilians in El Fasher and elsewhere continue to bear the cost of a war the courts cannot end.

What to watch next

Three indicators will tell whether the verdict registers beyond the courtroom. First, whether the ICC moves to consolidate its existing 2024 indictment of Hemedti with the evidentiary record now being built by Sudanese military prosecutors. Second, whether Gulf and Western capitals use the ruling to step up sanctions designations against RSF-linked commercial networks, particularly gold traders operating out of Chad and the Central African Republic. Third, whether famine declarations in Darfur expand in the coming weeks, which would force a humanitarian access negotiation that neither side currently wants.

What remains uncertain is whether any external actor has the leverage to compel both sides into the same room. The sources do not specify which governments have been in contact with Port Sudan or with the RSF leadership in the days surrounding the verdict, beyond the long-standing pattern of UAE-RSF ties and Egyptian-army coordination. The gap between the volume of statements issued on Sudan and the volume of aid actually delivered inside it continues to widen.

This article was reported from a single wire dispatch and contextualised against the publicly documented trajectory of Sudan's civil war since April 2023. Where the source material did not specify a date, location, or named official, Monexus has not inferred one.