The head of the World Health Organization said about 70 people were killed in the attack on the only functioning hospital in Sudan’s besieged city of El Fasher. .
The Saudi attack was at Mother Hospital, where local officials blamed the rebels’ swift support forces, and the group inflicted apparent battlefield losses on Sudanese and allied forces under the command of Prime Minister Abdel Fattah Burhan. I came to see it.
That includes Burhan, who appeared near a burning oil refinery north of Khartoum on Saturday and said his forces had been seized from the RSF.
Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry condemned the attack as a “violation of international law.”
International mediation attempts and pressure tactics, including the US assessment that the RSF and its proxies are committing genocide and sanctions targeting Burhan, have not stopped the fighting.
Reported attacks follow RFS alerts
Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted on social platform X the death toll in El Fasher’s hospital attack.
Officials in the capital of North Darfur state and others had cited similar figures on Saturday, but Ghebreyesus is the first international source to provide casualty figures. Reporting on Sudan is extremely difficult given the communication challenges, the indiscriminate violence faced by civilians, and the exaggerations by both the RSF and the Sudanese military.
“The horrifying attack on the Saudi hospital in El Fasher, Sudan, resulted in 19 injuries and 70 deaths among patients and colleagues,” Ghebreyesus wrote. “At the time of the attack, the hospital was packed with patients receiving care.”
Another medical facility in Al-Malja was also attacked on Saturday, he added.
“We continue to call for an end to all attacks on Sudan’s health care, allowing full access for the rapid restoration of damaged facilities,” he wrote. “Above all, the people of Sudan need peace. The best medicine is peace.”
Ghebreyesus did not specify who initiated the attack, but local officials blamed the RSF for the attack. Clementine Nkweta Salami, the UN official coordinating the world body’s humanitarian efforts in Sudan, said on Thursday that the RSF had “given a 48-hour ultimatum to force the Sudanese army to vacate the city to form an alliance”. , he warned that he was indicative of the upcoming offense.
“El Fasher has been under RSF siege since May 2024,” she said. “Civilians in El Fasher have already endured months of suffering, violence and gross human rights violations under prolonged siege. Their lives hang in the balance due to an increasingly precarious situation. It’s on.”
RSF did not immediately acknowledge the attack at El Fasher, more than 800 kilometers (500 miles) southwest of Khartoum. The city is currently estimated to be home to over 1 million people, many of whom have been displaced by the war.
The RSF siege has left 782 civilians dead and more than 1,140 injured, the United Nations said in December, which warned the numbers were high.
The Saudi Hospital, just north of the airport in El Fasher, is near the front lines of the war and is repeatedly seen in shelling. Still, the doctor continues to operate while the hospital is under attack, sometimes by the light of a cell phone.
However, RSF recently appeared to have lost control of the Khartoum refinery, which is Sudan’s largest and important to both its economy and South Sudan.
Burhan’s forces also say they broke another RSF siege of the Signals Corps headquarters in northern Khartoum. The rebels claimed they were “tightening the noose” around the base.
Sudan’s war sees atrocities by fighters
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 RSF General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo joined the army to lead a military coup in October. 2021.
Al-Bashir, along with RSF’s predecessor Janjaweed, faces charges at the International Criminal Court for carrying out a genocidal campaign in the western region of Darfur in the early 2000s. Rights groups and the United Nations say the RSF and Arab militias are once again attacking African groups in this war.
RSF and Sudanese forces began fighting each other in April 2023. Their conflict has killed more than 28,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes and left families grazing in a desperate attempt to survive as famine sweeps parts of the country.
Other estimates suggest a much higher death toll in the civil war.
On Sunday, Burhan traveled to the military’s general headquarters in Khartoum, a building he had not been to since fighting broke out in 2023.
“The military is in top condition and we will move forward with the determination of our people to eliminate the insurgency across Sudan,” Burhan said.
