Ethiopia's federal military claims restraint while reporting it killed 272 Tigrayan fighters and wounded 260 in a single counter-offensive in North Wollo. Field Marshal Berhanu Jula frames the government's posture as 'strategic calm,' but the TPLF's Tigray Army describes a full-scale offensive involving infantry, mechanised units, and drones. The UN has expressed alarm over drone strikes on civilians. Internet access across northern Ethiopia was cut on Friday. These are not the signals of restraint. The proximate trigger is the formation of the Ethiopian Peoples' Forces Alliance for Survival — seven armed groups united in the goal of removing Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government. Fighting has spread from Tigray into Afar and Amhara regions, with battles around Abala, Sama, Soqota, Raya Alamata, and the town of Alamata. This is no longer a Tigray-specific conflict; it is a multi-front insurgency across Ethiopia's north. The accusation architecture is familiar and escalatory. Addis Ababa accuses Asmara of funding the 'Tsimdo' alliance to weaken Ethiopia. Eritrea, fearing Ethiopian designs on Red Sea access, denies it. Both sides are rehearsing the proxy playbook that defined the 1998-2000 border war and the 2020-2022 Tigray conflict. The structural incentive for Eritrea to back Ethiopian rebels is real: a destabilised Ethiopia cannot project power toward the Red Sea coast. The 2022 Pretoria Agreement is now in severe strain — effectively a dead letter. Alemayehu Weldemariam of Indiana University told Al Jazeera that the federal government itself sabotaged the deal through fuel, service, and cash restrictions on Tigray, failure to establish the promised interim administration, and exclusion of Tigray from national elections. What was designed as a transitional framework became a tool of continued marginalisation. Washington's timing could not be worse. Weeks before fighting escalated, the US lifted sanctions on Ethiopia and Eritrea tied to atrocities from the last war, declaring the 'national emergency has expired.' That sanctions lift removed the primary external leverage constraining both governments. The signal it sent — that accountability for the previous war's mass atrocities would not be enforced — likely emboldened hardliners on all sides. At the UN General Assembly, Ethiopia's president cast the country as a regional stabiliser while accusing unnamed external actors of meddling. This is the standard playbook: frame domestic conflict as foreign interference, invoke sovereignty, and request international non-interference. It works until the humanitarian catastrophe reaches a scale that forces external action — which, given the precedent of 2020-2022, may take hundreds of thousands of deaths. The structural picture is grim. A landlocked country of 120 million people, already food-insecure, is fracturing along ethnic and regional lines with no credible peace framework, no external enforcement mechanism, and a government that simultaneously claims restraint and reports killing hundreds of fighters in a single operation. The Pretoria model — negotiate, sign, then selectively implement — has been tested and failed.
