This article contains upsetting details.
Across Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo the UN estimates 48.6 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. To put that in perspective, that is 70% of the population of the UK. Imagine 7 out of every 10 people you know in dire need of assistance, and you will have some grasp of the enormous scale of the crisis. Both conflicts have featured mass ethnic killings, mass rape, crimes against children and allegations of genocide. Both conflicts have global links and implications. Both are developing situations with recent headlines. So why is the BBC not driving British audiences to awareness of these horrific conflicts and their human costs?
Both of these conflicts are immensely complex and any short explainer will be woefully inadequate, however, here are some key facts:
Sudan
The civil war in Sudan has now entered its fourth year. In Sudan, 33.7 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. 12 million are displaced, many multiple times as the fronts of the war have moved. 19.5 million people are reported to be facing food insecurity with 825,000 children at risk of malnutrition. The fighting has destroyed agricultural production, food supply systems and healthcare, and just this month the IPC warned that severe drought is a worsening factor in the catastrophe.
The Civil war broke out in 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces, the SAF, and the Rapid Support Forces, the RSF. These two groups are former allies, who participated in a coup in 2021 which ended hopes for a civilian led democratic revolution. The RSF grew out of Arab militias the government used to crush rebellion in the Darfur region in the early 2000’s, notorious for mass killings, rape and forced displacement against non-Arab communities.
In 2025 the RSF captured El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and UN investigators found mass killings, mass rape, and identity-based executions. The UN has accused the RSF of genocide, as did the US state department, although no criminal determination has been made.
The war is about political power, integration of the RSF into the Sudanese military, control of territory, Gold mining and access to the Red Sea. The democracy the Sudanese people demanded in 2019 lies in tatters while two armies maraud across their country raping and pillaging.
Congo
In Congo, the situation is even more complex. The Democratic Republic of Congo is geographically vast, with the fighting concentrated in Eastern Congo, near the border with Rwanda. There could be more than 100 different armed groups operating in the DRC each with their own grievances and objectives, and the human cost is astronomical. The Rwanda aligned M23 group, the ISIS affiliated ADF, the Hutu FDLR and the Congolese military have all been accused of mass atrocities against civilians.
Since 1996, as many as 6 million people may have been killed, although that figure does include indirect deaths as well as deaths in conflict. Right now, reports say that 14.9 million people are in need of humanitarian aid, 26.6 million people are facing acute food insecurity, and 4.18 million children were suffering or expected to suffer acute malnutrition in the year July 2025- June 2026. Armed groups attack villages and towns, massacring civilians and executing people accused of supporting opponents. Little boys are kidnapped and forced into becoming child soldiers, with Save the Children reporting as many as 13000 children may be in armed groups in Ituri province alone, being drugged and exposed to horrific violence. Sexual violence is often used strategically to terrorise communities, and rape survivors, face enormous barriers to medical treatment, with rapes, sexualised torture and gang rapes often resulting in catastrophic injury or death. Child rape is terrifyingly common, with the UN reporting victims as young as toddlers, and “a child raped every half hour” Mass repeated displacements, a devastated healthcare system and a recent Ebola outbreak all compound the horror unfolding in the DRC.
The conflict is astoundingly complex but two major issues drive it.
After the Rwandan genocide in 1994 large numbers of Hutu refugees crossed into the DRC, then known as Zaire. This included perpetrators of the genocide and Hutu extremists who eventually formed into the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or the FDLR, who pose a security threat for the Rwandan government and commit atrocities against Congolese Tutsi civilians. The M23 rebel group who control territory in eastern Congo receive considerable support from the Rwandan government and claim to stand to protect Congolese Tutsi’s and press grievances against the Congolese government. They have been guilty of horrific abuses against Congolese Hutu civilians. This means that the Rwandan government is supporting a rebel faction in a neighbouring country, and whether that is entirely for legitimate security concerns or not is something that deserves rigorous investigation.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is a vastly resource wealthy country and should be one of the richest nations on earth. It has enormous deposits of Gold, Tin, Copper and Diamonds as well as Cobalt used for electric vehicles and Coltan used for electronic components in devices such as smart phones. Rather than producing wealth for the Congolese people these resources are exploited and often finance the armed groups that terrorise them. One investigation found that the M23 rebels were raising $800,000 dollars per month in taxation on the Coltan mining trade in Eastern Congo, and the question of conflict minerals crossing the border into Rwanda to become indistinguishable from minerals of non-conflict origin is a moral one the west cannot ignore.
The BBC is reporting on these issues, in Africa. BBC Africa and BBC Eye Africa and even some World Service coverage is evident, so why then are editorial teams not bringing this to the attention of British Audiences? They cannot claim to be unaware.
In the six months from the 15th April 2026 the BBC website featured 25 stories about the war in Sudan, and 10 about the war in the DRC (excluding content solely focused on Ebola and not the conflict itself). In the same period, it featured 252 stories on Israel.
Across its flagship news channels, the BBC News Television channel and BBC radio 4, we found 73 stories about the conflict in Sudan and just 6 about the conflict in the DRC. On Israel on the other hand, an AI search tool identified a staggering 12,196 clips mentioning Israel in that same six-month period. A number so high that manual verification of how many of those clips are specifically about the war (as the standard was for Sudan and Congo) becomes a long-term project.
The discrepancy does not need to be perfectly numerically accounted before it can be called out. The BBC floods the British media landscape with news stories from Gaza and the West Bank daily. In the last week alone the BBC News Channel and Radio 4 reported on Israel in the context of war 157 times, that’s more than Sudan and Congo combined in six months. This attention is an agenda setting power. What audiences see repeatedly they are most likely to consider important.
There is no credible excuse for African reporting to not be making it to British BBC audiences. There is no argument that this is not of public interest. Red Sea trade, strategic alliances, diaspora communities and the conflict mineral trade all make these stories relevant to British audiences over and above the simple moral imperative of millions of people’s lives.
In Gaza, the last IPC report projected that 74.2 thousand children were at risk of malnutrition. In Congo, that number is almost 4.2 million. That is 56 Gazas. By what calculations are Gazan children considered to be so much more important that Congolese children? How far south do we have to go from the Egyptian border before skin becomes too dark for a child’s starvation to matter?
There should be no comparison. Congolese and Sudanese suffering is just as important as Gazan suffering. So why does the BBC think that Gaza, and Palestinians more generally, belong so much higher up in the national consciousness.
Next to skin colour, another potential explanation is agency.
We at CAMERA have written extensively about the way the BBC erases any trace of Palestinian agency. But it is very difficult to tell the stories of Congolese or Sudanese civilians as passive, reactive victims. In 2019 the Sudanese people managed to overthrow a dictator and demand democracy for themselves. Since the outbreak of the current war, Sudanese civilians have organised The Emergency Response Rooms, a community initiative to coordinate mutual aid with over 26000 volunteers risking their lives to protect their communities. In Congo too, community organising, demands for fair democracy and mutual aid are struggling against the daily horrors rampaging in their communities, often facing attacks from armed actors.
The Sudanese and Congolese people deserve our attention, they deserve our respect, they deserve support for the free democracies that they want to build, they deserve western demand for regulation on the trades that fund their subjugation, and they deserve to be treated with every bit as much seriousness as the Palestinian people do.
Perhaps the true tragedy of the Sudanese and Congolese people is that the BBC can’t blame Jews for their pain.