About 70 people were killed in an attack on the only functional hospital in the besieged city of El Fasher in Sudan, the chief of the WHO said yesterday, part of a series of attacks coming as the African nation’s civil war escalated in recent days.
The attack on the Saudi Teaching Maternal Hospital, which local officials blamed on the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF), came as the group has seen apparent battlefield losses to the Sudanese Armed Forces and allied forces under the command of Lieutenant-General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. That includes Burhan appearing near a burning oil refinery north of Khartoum on Saturday that his forces said they seized from the RSF.
International mediation attempts and pressure tactics, including a US assessment that the RSF and its proxies are committing genocide and sanctions targeting Burhan, have not halted the fighting.
Photo: AP
In the Saudi hospital attack in El Fasher, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus offered the death toll in a post on the social platform X.
Officials and others in the capital of North Darfur province had cited a similar figure on Saturday, but Ghebreyesus is the first international source to provide a casualty number. Reporting on Sudan is incredibly difficult given communication challenges and exaggerations by the RSF and the Sudanese military.
“The appalling attack on Saudi Hospital in El Fasher, Sudan, led to 19 injuries and 70 deaths among patients and companions,” Ghebreyesus wrote. “At the time of the attack, the hospital was packed with patients receiving care.”
Another health facility in Al Malha also was attacked on Saturday, he added.
Ghebreyesus did not identify who launched the attack, although local officials had blamed the RSF for the assault. UN official Clementine Nkweta-Salami, who coordinates humanitarian efforts for the world body in Sudan, on Thursday warned that the RSF earlier had given “a 48-hour ultimatum to forces allied to the Sudanese Armed Forces to vacate the city and indicated a forthcoming offensive.”
“Since May 2024, El Fasher has been under RSF siege,” she said. “Civilians in El Fasher have already endured months of suffering, violence and gross human rights abuses under the prolonged siege. Their lives now hang in the balance due to an increasingly precarious situation.”
The RSF did not immediately acknowledge the attack in El Fasher, which is more than 800km southwest of Khartoum. The city is now estimated to be home to more than 1 million people, many of whom have been displaced by the war.
The RSF siege has seen 782 civilians killed and more than 1,140 others wounded, the UN said last month, warning the figures likely were higher.
The Saudi hospital, just north of El Fasher’s airport, sits near the frontlines of the war and has been repeatedly hit by shelling.
However, its doctors continue surgeries, sometimes by the light of cellphones.
Sudan has been unstable since a popular uprising forced the removal of longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
A short-lived transition to democracy was derailed when Burhan and General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo of the RSF joined forces to lead a military coup in October 2021.
The RSF and Sudan’s military began fighting each other in April 2023. Their conflict has killed more than 28,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes and left some families eating grass in a desperate attempt to survive as famine sweeps parts of the country.
Other estimates suggest a far higher death toll in the civil war.
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