A drone and artillery attack killed at least 60 people at a displaced persons camp in Sudan’s El-Fasher on Saturday, activists said, as rapid support paramilitary forces intensified their attack on the besieged western town.
The resistance committee in El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, said the RSF struck the Dar al-Arqam displacement center, located on the grounds of a university.
“Children, women and the elderly were killed in cold blood, and many were burned to the ground,” the statement said.
“The situation goes beyond disaster and genocide inside the city, and the world remains silent.”
The committee initially estimated the death toll at 30, but said the bodies remained trapped underground.
It later said 60 people were killed in the attack involving two drones and eight artillery shells.
Local resistance committees are activists who coordinate aid and document atrocities committed in the Sudanese conflict.
The RSF has been at war with the regular army since April 2023. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions and plunged nearly 25 million people into acute famine.
El-Fasher, the last state capital in the vast Darfur region to escape the RSF’s grip, has become the latest strategic front in the war as the paramilitaries try to consolidate their power in the west.
The United Nations human rights chief said Friday he was “appalled” by RSF’s recent killings of civilians in the city, including what appear to be ethnically motivated summary executions.
“Instead, they continue to kill, injure and displace civilians and attack civilian objects, including hospitals and mosques, in total disregard of international law,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk.
“This must end.”
Activists say the city has become “an open-air morgue” for starving civilians.
Nearly 18 months after the RSF siege began, El-Fasher – home to 400,000 trapped civilians – is running out of almost everything.
The pet food that families survived on for months has become scarce and now costs hundreds of dollars a bag.
The majority of soup kitchens in the city have been forced to close due to lack of food, according to local resistance committees.
On Thursday in El-Fasher, eyewitnesses said an RSF artillery attack killed 13 people in a mosque where displaced families were sheltering.
Between Tuesday and Wednesday, 20 people were killed in RSF strikes against El-Fasher hospital, one of the last functional health establishments in the city.
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Citing other recent attacks on a maternity ward, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on Saturday for “immediate protection of health facilities, as well as humanitarian access, so that we can support patients in need of urgent care and health workers in urgent need of medical supplies.”
Most of El Fasher’s hospitals have been repeatedly bombed and forced to close, depriving nearly 80 percent of those in need of medical care from accessing it, according to the United Nations.
Last month, at least 75 people were killed in a single drone strike on a mosque in the city.
According to UN figures released Tuesday, more than a million people have fled El-Fasher since the start of the war, representing 10 percent of all internally displaced people in the country.
The population of the city, once the region’s largest, has declined by about 62 percent, the U.N. migration agency said.
Civilians say daily strikes force them to spend most of their time underground, in small makeshift bunkers that families have dug in their backyards.
If the city falls to the paramilitaries, the RSF will control the entire Darfur region, where it has sought to establish a rival administration. The army controls the north, center and east of the country.
