A formulation is presented to perform crack propagation analyses in cohesive materials with the dual boundary element method (DBEM) using the tangential differential operator in the traction boundaryintegral equations. The cohesive law is introduced in the system of equations to directly compute the cohesive forces at each loading step. A single edge crack is analyzed with the linear function to describe the material softening law in the cohesive zone, and the results are compared with those from the literature.