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Federal troops and allied militias recaptured the Tigrayan capital of Mekelle on October 4, 2026, barely two weeks after the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and its partners seized local airports and launched attacks into neighboring Amhara and Afar regions. The Ethiopian Prime Minister’s Office subsequently named a six-month caretaker administration tasked with restoring public services, rebuilding infrastructure and organizing future elections in the region. According to a Rift Valley Institute analysis published in March 2026, many of the core issues that fueled the original 2020-2022 war, including territorial claims over Western Tigray and incomplete disarmament, had never been settled.
The Pretoria agreement of November 2022 halted large-scale combat that killed an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 people through violence, famine and lack of healthcare, Al Jazeera reported on November 11. Yet the pact deferred difficult political questions, among them the future political role of the TPLF, which was later deregistered and barred from national elections held in June 2026. A CNN dispatch from September 25 noted that former battlefield adversaries, including elements of the Amhara Fano militia, have now joined the TPLF in an alliance aimed at overthrowing the federal government, with a TPLF spokesman telling the Associated Press that the Pretoria accord was “no longer valid.”
Humanitarian conditions across Tigray remain precarious more than a year after the initial peace deal. An International Organization for Migration-led assessment covering 78 displacement sites found that nearly 307,000 internally displaced people faced acute shortages of food, clean water, shelter and protection services, with 45 sites receiving no protection support at all. Al Jazeera described families in Abi Adi who have lived in former school buildings since fleeing Western Tigray, their hopes of return repeatedly dashed by successive rounds of violence and unresolved land disputes.
Tensions escalated further in early 2026 when the TPLF reinstated its pre-war regional council and elected Debretsion Gebremichael as president, moves the federal government viewed as unconstitutional. A new pro-government Tigray Peace Force emerged in 2025 and clashed repeatedly with TPLF-aligned fighters, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. By late September the conflict had drawn in Eritrean troops along the border, prompting Ethiopia to accuse Asmara of an “all-out invasion” in a letter to the United Nations Security Council, Chatham House analysts observed on November 11.
The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights issued a statement in October urging all parties to uphold the Pretoria commitments and avoid actions that could widen the fighting. Human Rights Watch and partner organizations warned the UN Human Rights Council that renewed drone strikes, artillery use near displacement camps and restrictions on telecommunications risked repeating past civilian harm. Crisis Group monitoring indicated that thousands of TPLF fighters have since surrendered or registered for demobilization programs, though low-level guerrilla activity continues in rural districts.
Ethiopia’s federal authorities have pledged to hold elections in Tigray within the caretaker period while pressing ahead with rehabilitation schemes for former combatants. The National Rehabilitation Commission reported on November 5 that roughly 5,500 ex-fighters were already enrolled in training centers in Mekelle. Nevertheless, analysts from the Rift Valley Institute caution that without genuine political inclusion and resolution of territorial grievances, the region risks remaining trapped in a cycle of intermittent violence that threatens stability across the Horn of Africa.
