About 70 people have been killed in an attack on the only functional hospital in the besieged city of El Fasher in Sudan, the head of the World Health Organization said on Sunday, the latest in a series of attacks as the African nation’s civil war has escalated in recent days.
The attack on the Saudi Teaching Maternal hospital was blamed by local officials on the rebel Rapid Support Forces, a group that has recently faced apparent battlefield losses to the Sudanese military and allied forces under the command of army chief Gen Abdel-Fattah Burhan.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry denounced the attack as “a violation of international law”.
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.
“The appalling attack on Saudi hospital in El Fasher, Sudan, led to 19 injuries and 70 deaths among patients and companions,” the WHO director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, wrote on X. “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.
“We continue to call for a cessation of all attacks on health care in Sudan, and to allow full access for the swift restoration of the facilities that have been damaged,” he wrote. “Above all, Sudan’s people need peace. The best medicine is peace.”
Ghebreyesus did not identify who had launched the attack, though local officials had blamed the RSF for the assault. Clementine Nkweta-Salami, a UN official who coordinates humanitarian efforts in Sudan, warned on Thursday that the RSF 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 over 800km (500 miles) south-west 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 had killed 782 civilians and wounded more than 1,140 others, the UN said in December, warning the true figures were likely to be higher.
The Saudi hospital, just north of El Fasher’s airport, is near the frontlines of the war and has been repeatedly hit by shelling. Its doctors continue carrying out surgeries, sometimes by the light of mobile phones while the hospital is hit.
However, the RSF appeared in recent days to have lost control of the Khartoum refinery, the biggest in Sudan and crucial to its economy and that of South Sudan. Burhan’s forces also say they broke a RSF besiegement of the Signal Corps headquarters in northern Khartoum. The rebels claimed they were “tightening the noose” around that base.
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 Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo of the RSF joined forces to lead a military coup in October 2021.
Al-Bashir faces charges at the international criminal court over carrying out a genocidal campaign in the early 2000s in the western Darfur region with the Janjaweed, the precursor to the RSF. Rights groups and the UN say the RSF and allied Arab militias are again attacking ethnic African groups in this war.
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.