Nine dead in attack on Sudan hospital: WHO

An attack on the main hospital in the western Sudanese town of El-Fasher has killed nine people and wounded 20, the head of the World Health Organization said, forcing the facility to halt operations.

In a posting on X Saturday, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that “continued attacks on health across Sudan are deplorable.”

“We urge for the protection of all patients and health professionals, and for all attacks on and around health facilities to stop,” he added.

A medic, who works at the hospital, told AFP Saturday that operations at the facility have come to a complete halt following the drone attack by paramilitaries early Friday morning.

“The hospital has completely stopped working,” the doctor said, requesting anonymity because he was not authorised to brief the media.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), at war with the regular army since mid-April 2023, targeted the El-Fasher maternity hospital known as the Saudi Hospital with “four drone-guided missiles”, in the early hours of Friday, a statement by the army-aligned Health Ministry said on Friday evening.

It added that the attack “struck areas where patients’ companions were gathered as well as key locations of the hospital”.

A local committee in El-Fasher, one of hundreds of volunteering groups coordinating aid across Sudan, said that the shelling “destroyed the wards, pharmacies and the operating room at the hospital”.

El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, has been under paramilitary siege since May.

It has seen some of the fiercest clashes between the army and the RSF as both sides fight to secure the last foothold in the Darfur region.

On Tuesday, a Sudanese military air strike on a market in North Darfur killed more than 100 people, according to a pro-democracy lawyers’ group.

Nearly all of Darfur 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 Khartoum, 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) east of El-Fasher.

The war has killed tens of thousands and displaced over 11 million, creating what the United Nations describes as one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent memory.

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