U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) Volker Turk
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File image of Sudanese soldiers from the Rapid Support Forces unit, led by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo. File
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Dr. Jamal Eltaeb checks a patient at Al Nao Hospital in Omdurman, on the outskirts of Khartoum, on April 18, 2026.
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Image used for representational purposes only.
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Displaced Sudanese who fled El-Fasher after the city fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) rest in the camp located on the southwestern edge of Tawila

Displaced families from el-Fasher at a displacement camp where they sought refuge from fighting between government forces and the RSF, in Tawila, Darfur region, Sudan, October 31, 2025. (The Norwegian Refugee Council via AP)
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Famine has already gripped five areas across Sudan, according to a report last month by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed assessment. File
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An estimated 3.2 million children under the age of five are expected to face acute malnutrition this year in war-torn Sudan, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“Of this number, around 7,72,000 children are expected to suffer from severe acute malnutrition,” Eva Hinds, UNICEF Sudan’s Head of Advocacy and Communication, said late on Thursday (January 9, 2025).

Famine has already gripped five areas across Sudan, according to a report last month by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a UN-backed assessment.

Sudan has endured 20 months of war between the Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), killing tens of thousands and, according to the United Nations, uprooting 12 million in the world’s largest displacement crisis.

Confirming that 3.2 million children are currently expected to face acute malnutrition, Ms. Hinds said “the number of severely malnourished children increased from an estimated 7,30,000 in 2024 to over 7,70,000 in 2025.”

The IPC expects famine to expand to five more parts of Sudan’s western Darfur region by May — a vast area that has seen some of the conflict’s worst violence. A further 17 areas in western and central Sudan are also at risk of famine, it said.

“Without immediate, unhindered humanitarian access facilitating a significant scale-up of a multisectoral response, malnutrition is likely to increase in these areas,” Ms. Hinds warned.

Sudan’s Army-aligned government strongly rejected the IPC findings, while aid agencies complain that access is blocked by bureaucratic hurdles and ongoing violence.

In October 2024, experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council accused both sides of using “starvation tactics”.

On Tuesday (January 7, 2025), the United States determined that the RSF had “committed genocide” and imposed sanctions on the paramilitary group’s leader.

Across the country, more than 24.6 million people — around half the population — face “high levels of acute food insecurity,” according to IPC, which said: “Only a ceasefire can reduce the risk of famine spreading further”.

A Sudanese military air strike on a market in North Darfur killed more than 100 people, a pro-democracy lawyers’ group said Tuesday, as fighting raged across the war-torn country.

The Emergency Lawyers said the air strike on Monday also left hundreds injured in Kabkabiya, a town about 180 kilometres (112 miles) west of El-Fasher, the state capital that has been under siege by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since May.

The war between the RSF and the regular army has so far killed tens of thousands, uprooted over 11 million and created what the United Nations has called the worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory.

“The air strike took place on the town’s weekly market day, where residents from various nearby villages had gathered to shop, resulting in the death of more than 100 people and injury of hundreds, including women and children,” said the lawyers’ group, which has been documenting human rights abuses during the conflict.

They described it as a “horrendous massacre committed by Army air strikes”.

In footage sent to AFP purporting to show the aftermath of the strike, people were seen sifting through rubble as the charred remains of children lay on scorched ground.

The footage, which AFP was unable to independently verify, was supplied by civil society group the Darfur General Coordination of Camps for the Displaced and Refugees.

Though some drone attacks have been attributed to the RSF, the Sudanese military is the only party with fighter jets and maintains a functional monopoly on the skies.

In a statement Tuesday, the army accused RSF-affiliated political groups of “spreading lies” and said its forces “target rebel activity bases”.

Bus shelled

Darfur, a region the size of France, is home to around a quarter of Sudan’s population but more than half of the country’s displaced population.

Nearly all of it is now controlled by the RSF, which has also taken over swathes of the southern Kordofan region and central Sudan, while the army holds the country’s north and east.

Both forces are wrestling for full control of the war-torn capital, 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) east of El-Fasher.

In Omdurman, part of greater Khartoum, paramilitary artillery fire on a passenger bus killed at least 15 people, a medical source told AFP.

The Al-Nao hospital, one of the last facilities receiving patients in the area, also “received 45 injured from different areas”, the source said, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisals.

“We haven’t seen bombing this intense in six months,” one eyewitness to the passenger bus shelling told AFP, also requesting anonymity.

Most of Omdurman is under army control, while the RSF holds Khartoum North (Bahri) just across the Nile River.

Residents have continuously reported shelling across both sides of the river, with bombs and shrapnel regularly striking homes and civilians.

According to the United Nations, up to 80 percent of health facilities in Sudan’s worst affected areas are barely operational or closed.

‘Escalation campaign’

The lawyers’ group flagged other incidents around Sudan including one in South Darfur state capital Nyala, where they said three neighbourhoods were hit with barrel bombs on Monday evening.

They could not confirm a toll.

In North Kordofan state, a drone that had crashed on November 26 exploded on Monday evening, killing six people, the lawyers reported.

They said recent strikes across the country were part of an “escalation campaign… deliberately concentrated on densely populated residential areas”, contradicting claims by warring parties that they only target military objectives.

Both the army and the RSF have been accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians and deliberately bombing residential areas.

On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch accused the RSF and allied Arab militias of carrying out numerous abuses against civilians in South Kordofan state from December 2023 to March 2024.

The rights organisation accused the groups of “war crimes” including “killings, rapes, and abductions of ethnic Nuba residents, as well as the looting and destruction of homes”.

The group also urged the United Nations and the African Union to deploy a mission to protect civilians in Sudan.

The Sudanese army, which has been fighting the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since April 2023, has been advancing towards the capital in recent weeks, in a bid to regain control of Khartoum. File.
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A Sudanese network of volunteer rescuers said that 28 civilians were killed Sunday when a fuel station in an area of Khartoum under paramilitary control came under shelling.

The Sudanese Army, which has been fighting the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since April 2023, has been advancing towards the capital in recent weeks, in a bid to regain control of Khartoum.

On Sunday, a fuel station in RSF-held southern Khartoum was hit by shelling, said the South Belt Emergency Response Room.

The youth-led volunteer group said “28 people were confirmed dead” and “the number of injured reached 37, including 29 burns cases” and some shrapnel injuries.

Early in the war, which has pitted Army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against the forces of his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, the paramilitaries had largely pushed the army out of Khartoum.

The government, loyal to Burhan, is based in Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast, where the army has retained control.

The war has killed tens of thousands of civilians and displaced over 11 million, creating what the United Nations has described as the world’s largest displacement crisis.

In late November, the Sudanese army said it had retaken the Sennar state capital, Sinja, south of Khartoum, five months after paramilitaries had seized it.

Sinja is a strategic area as it lies on a key road linking army-controlled areas of eastern and central Sudan.

The RSF meanwhile has taken control of nearly all of the vast western region of Darfur, rampaged through the agricultural heartland of central Sudan and pushed into the army-controlled southeast.

For months, Aziza Abrahim fled from one village in Sudan to the next as people were slaughtered. Yet the killing of relatives and her husband’s disappearance aren’t what forced the 23-year-old to leave the country for good. It was hunger, she said.

“We don’t have anything to eat because of the war,” Abrahim said, cradling her 1-year-old daughter under the sheet where she now shelters, days after crossing into Chad.

The war in Sudan has created vast hunger, including famine. It has pushed people off their farms. Food in the markets is sparse, prices have spiked and aid groups say they’re struggling to reach the most vulnerable as warring parties limit access.

Some 24,000 people have been killed and millions displaced during the war that erupted in April 2023, sparked by tensions between the military and a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces. Global experts confirmed famine in the Zamzam displacement camp in July. They warn that some 25 million people — more than half of Sudan’s population — are expected to face acute hunger this year.

“People are starving to death at the moment … It’s man-made. It’s these men with guns and power who deny women and children food,” Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, told The Associated Press. Warring parties on both sides are blocking assistance and delaying authorization for aid groups, he said.

Between May and September, there were seven malnutrition-related deaths among children in one hospital at a displacement site in Chad run by Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF. Such deaths can be from disease in hunger-weakened bodies.

In September, MSF was forced to stop caring for 5,000 malnourished children in North Darfur for several weeks, citing repeated, deliberate obstructions and blockades. U.S. President Joe Biden has called on both sides to allow unhindered access and stop killing civilians.

But the fighting shows no signs of slowing. More than 2,600 people were killed across the country in October, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, which called it the bloodiest month of the war.

Violence is intensifying around North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, the only capital in the vast western Darfur region that the RSF doesn’t hold. Darfur has experienced some of the war’s worst atrocities, and the International Criminal Court prosecutor has said there are grounds to believe both sides may be committing war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.

Abrahim escaped her village in West Darfur and sought refuge for more than a year in nearby towns with friends and relatives. Her husband had left home to find work before the war, and she hasn’t heard from him since.

She struggled to eat and feed their daughter. Unable to farm, she cut wood and sold it in Chad, traveling eight hours by donkey there and back every few days, earning enough to buy grain. But after a few months the wood ran out, forcing her to leave for good.

Others who have fled to Chad described food prices spiking three-fold and stocks dwindling in the market. There were no vegetables, just grains and nuts.

Awatif Adam came to Chad in October. Her husband wasn’t making enough transporting people with his donkey cart, and it was too risky to farm, she said. Her 6-year-old twin girls and 3-year-old son lost weight and were always hungry.

“My children were saying all the time, ‘Mom, give us food’,” she said. Their cries drove her to leave.

As more people stream into Chad, aid groups worry about supporting them.

Some 700,000 Sudanese have entered since the war began. Many live in squalid refugee camps or shelter at the border in makeshift displacement sites. And the number of arrivals at the Adre crossing between August and October jumped from 6,100 to 14,800, according to government and U.N. data., though it was not clear whether some people entered multiple times.

Earlier this year, the World Food Program cut rations by roughly half in Chad, citing a lack of funding.

While there’s now enough money to return to full rations until the start of next year, more arrivals will strain the system and more hunger will result if funding doesn’t keep pace, said Ramazani Karabaye, head of the World Food Program’s operations in Adre.

During an AP visit to Adre in October, some people who fled Sudan at the start of the war said they were still struggling.

Khadiga Omer Adam said she doesn’t have enough aid or money to eat regularly, which has complicated breastfeeding her already malnourished daughter, Salma Issa. The 35-year-old gave birth during the war’s initial days, delivering alone in West Darfur. It was too dangerous for a midwife to reach her.

Adam had clutched the baby as she fled through villages, begging for food. More than a year later, she sat on a hospital bed holding a bag of fluid above her daughter, who was fed through a tube in her nose.

“I have confidence in the doctors … I believe she’ll improve, I don’t think she’ll die,” she said.

The MSF-run clinic in the Aboutengue camp admitted more than 340 cases of severely malnourished children in August and September. Staff fear that number could rise. The arid climate in Chad south of the Sahara Desert means it’s hard to farm, and there’s little food variety, health workers said.

People are fleeing Sudan into difficult conditions, said Dr. Oula Dramane Ouattara, head of MSF’s medical activities in the camp.

”If things go on like this, I’m afraid the situation will get out of control,” he said.