{"id":20142,"date":"2026-10-22T14:19:57","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T12:19:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/?p=20142"},"modified":"2026-10-22T14:19:57","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T12:19:57","slug":"eigad-hangaliya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zawia3.com\/en\/eigad-hangaliya\/","title":{"rendered":"Gold Miners Under Attack: What the Ground Reveals at Eigad and Hangaliya"},"content":{"rendered":"

Satellite images analysed by Zawia3 show an unusual change at two gold-mining sites 308 kilometres apart, occurring within the same 48-hour period in which survivors said a fighter jet bombed their mine on the morning of Saturday, 10 October. One site is inside the Halaib Triangle; the other is in the Eastern Desert, southwest of Marsa Alam.<\/p>\n

At 10:24 a.m. Sudan time on Saturday, 10 October 2026, the European Sentinel-2A satellite passed over a rocky valley dotted with mining pits, 8.7 kilometres north of the 22nd parallel inside the Halaib Triangle. Its sensors recorded a dark patch of approximately 4,400 square metres in the heart of the valley that had not been there 48 hours earlier. Roughly two and a half hours before that, according to miner Abdel Aziz Youssef’s account to Agence France-Presse, a fighter jet appeared overhead and \u201cstruck five times\u201d.<\/p>\n

Some 308 kilometres to the north, inside Egyptian territory southwest of Marsa Alam, the same satellite recorded a second dark patch of approximately 2,800 square metres within the same time window, at a location inside a state gold-mining concession.<\/p>\n

Zawia3 re-examined the published reporting on the 10 October strikes, from witness accounts and casualty figures to open-source analyses and official statements, and retained the raw data for 31 satellite scenes of the two sites between 1 September and 18 October. This report sets out what could be established, what remains attributed to its sources, and what requires fieldwork that images cannot provide.<\/p>\n

The investigation tests a specific question: how far do satellite images and published documents support accounts of the attack on the miners, and what can be established about the Eigad and Hangaliya sites and the timing of the changes there? Zawia3’s contribution consists of measuring these changes through a time series, testing them against earlier scenes, and matching the Hangaliya location to the concession boundaries recorded in documents, while separating those findings from conclusions about what caused the traces and who was responsible.<\/p>\n

A dark patch appeared at both sites between the mornings of 8 and 10 October. No comparable darkening appeared between 3 and 8 October.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Saturday morning in North al-Wadi<\/h2>\n

Miners call the area \u201cNorth al-Wadi\u201d and the mountain whose slopes they work \u201cJabal al-Uqaydat\u201d. Some call it \u201cthe Red Mountain\u201d, according to witnesses interviewed by BBC Arabic. Miner Mirghani Malik was among the first to describe what happened, speaking that same night to Sudan Tribune<\/a>. He said fighter jets had carried out at least five strikes on the al-Uqaydat mine, at least 20 injured people had been taken to al-Ansari market, and hundreds of workers had fled into the mountains without water or supplies.<\/p>\n

The following day, AFP<\/a> quoted miner Abdel Aziz Youssef as saying a fighter jet appeared at around 8 a.m. and struck five times. Survivor Sharaf Ali said thousands of workers were at the site when the strike hit, and those who fled scattered, leaving nobody able to establish the death toll. Miner Ali Muhammad Hamza told Africanews<\/a> that the aircraft circled three times and struck on its fourth pass while he was making tea. Omar Muhyial Din Abdallah said the first strike exploded among the miners, and that he lost his brother and two cousins. In a later report<\/a>, a survivor named Omar Muhyial Din told AFP that he had seen an Egyptian flag on the aircraft.<\/p>\n

The accounts differ on the time: 6 a.m., according to three survivors interviewed by Sudan Tribune<\/a>; 8 a.m., according to AFP and Africanews; and 10 a.m., according to a witness interviewed by the Ayin Network<\/a>. BBC Arabic<\/a> quoted miner Bahr al-Din Muhammad as saying one strike killed 35 miners at once, but dated the strike to Friday, unlike most sources. Witness Bahr al-Din Hassan told The New York Times<\/a>, according to a republished copy of its report, that aircraft bombed the site at least three times over an hour beginning around 9 a.m., and that about 35 people were killed in the first strike. This matches the BBC account, and the two witnesses may be the same person. A survivor told Atar Network that a strike occurred at 11:20 a.m. and that the bombing lasted more than three hours. The accounts agree that the attack came from the air, but vary between one and five strikes.<\/p>\n

Between six and eleven in the morning: accounts differ on the time of the strikes, but almost all place them on Saturday, 10 October.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Times and sources of the witness accounts: the following two charts show where the accounts differ, without assuming that all are independent testimonies.<\/p>\n