A drone strike by Sudan鈥檚 paramilitary Rapid Support Forces killed eight people in a maternity ward in the besieged city of El-Fasher, a medical source said on Wednesday.
The RSF is currently waging its fiercest assault ever on El-Fasher in an attempt to wrest control of the city away from their rivals, the regular army.
Since April 2023, the war between the two forces has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions and pushed nearly 25 million people into acute hunger.
Activists say El-Fasher, the last state capital in the vast western Darfur region to elude the paramilitary鈥檚 grasp, has become 鈥榓n open-air morgue鈥� for starved civilians.
Tuesday鈥檚 deadly strike on El-Fasher Hospital also injured seven people and 鈥榙amaged buildings and equipment鈥�, the health worker said on condition of anonymity out of fear for their safety.
The hospital is one of the last functioning health facilities in the city, with most repeatedly bombed and forced to shut.
Nearly 80 per cent of households in need of medical care in El-Fasher are unable to access it, according to the United Nations.
Exhausted medical teams are already scrambling to treat the injured from the daily attacks on the city.
Doctors, using satellite internet connections to circumvent a communications blackout, say they have taken to using bits of mosquito netting as a substitute for gauze.
Nearly 18 months into the RSF鈥檚 siege, the city 鈥� home to 4,00,000 trapped civilians 鈥� has run out of nearly everything.
The animal feed families have survived on for months has grown scarce and now costs hundreds of dollars a sack.
The majority of the city鈥檚 soup kitchens have been forced shut for lack of food, according to local resistance committees, volunteer groups coordinating aid.
According to UN figures released Tuesday, more than 1 million people have fled El-Fasher since the war began, accounting for 10 per cent of all internally displaced people in the country.
The population of the city, once the region鈥檚 largest, has decreased by around 62 per cent, the UN鈥檚 migration agency said.
Civilians say the daily strikes force them to spend most of their time underground, in small makeshift bunkers families have dug in their back yards.
Satellite imagery shows the RSF has built dozens of kilometres of walls around the city, leaving only a small exit where they are reportedly extorting civilians for safe passage.
The UN has repeatedly warned of 鈥榣arge-scale, ethnically driven attacks and atrocities鈥� in the city, where the RSF has overrun multiple famine-hit displacement camps, killing hundreds.
鈥楢fter over 500 days of unremitting siege by the RSF and incessant fighting, El-Fasher is on the precipice of an even greater catastrophe if urgent measures are not taken to loosen the armed vice upon the city and to protect civilians,鈥� UN rights chief Volker Turk said Thursday.
