• Monday, 27 January 2025

70 people killed in attack on hospital in Sudan's Darfur region

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UAE, Jan. 27: Some 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 World Health Organization said Sunday, 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, came as the group has seen apparent battlefield losses to the Sudanese military and allied forces under the command of army chief Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan. That includes Burhan appearing near a burning oil refinery north of Khartoum on Saturday that his forces said they seized from the RSF.

Saudi Arabia's Foreign Ministry denounced the attack as "a violation of international law."

International mediation attempts and pressure tactics, including a U.S. assessment that the RSF and its proxies are committing genocide and sanctions targeting Burhan, have not halted the fighting.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted the death toll in the hospital attack in El Fasher on the social platform X.

Officials and others in the capital of North Darfur province had cited a similar figure Saturday, but Ghebreyesus is the first international source to provide a casualty number. Reporting on Sudan is incredibly difficult given communication challenges, the indiscriminate violence faced by civilians and exaggerations by both 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 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 launched the attack, though local officials had blamed the RSF for the assault. United Nations official Clementine Nkweta-Salami, who coordinates humanitarian efforts for the world body in Sudan, warned Thursday 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 over 800 kilometres (500 miles) southwest of Khartoum. The city is now estimated to be home to over 1 million people, many of whom have been displaced by the war.

The RSF siege has seen 782 civilians killed and over 1,140 others wounded, the U.N. said in December, 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. Still, its doctors continue surgeries, sometimes by the light of mobile phones while the hospital is hit. (AP)

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