A fire at a Sudanese military factory early this morning has been blamed on Israeli air strikes, with Information Minister Ahmed Belal Osman claiming four Israeli warplanes with “sophisticated technology” attacked the site before dawn.
Israeli officials have so far been mum on the matter, and the Sudanese officials provided no evidence beyond “they came from the east,” and citing the 2009 Israeli air strike near the Red Sea. Belal claimed Israel did it to “weaken the sovereignty of Sudan.”
Why this would be in the first place is unclear, but Sudanese opposition officials claimed that the Khartoum factory secretly belongs to the Iranian military, and that the factory was meant to provide weaponry to Hamas.
This too is an unverified claim, as Iran has denied any interest in the Sudanese arms industry in the past, and with northern Africa awash in weapons since the Libyan Civil War, it isn’t clear that they’d need to manufacture weapons for smuggling them into Gaza when they could just as easily be bought from looters.
This is not the first time — nor the last one, of course — that Isreal flies over Sudan and in the day of light, bombs civilian targets. The Sudanese are right to point to the terrorists as the culprits. I can only hope that they retaliate and they do it in style.