At least eight people were killed Tuesday when a drone strike by Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces hit a maternity ward in the besieged city of el-Fasher, a medical source told AFP 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 its 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's grasp, has become "an open-air morgue" for starved civilians.
Tuesday's deadly strike on el-Fasher Hospital also injured seven people and "damaged buildings and equipment," 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, which has been repeatedly bombed and forced to shut down.
Nearly 80% 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's siege, the city – home to 400,000 trapped civilians – 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's soup kitchens have been forced shut for lack of food, according to local resistance committees and volunteer groups coordinating aid.
According to U.N. figures released Tuesday, more than 1 million people have fled el-Fasher since the war began, accounting for 10% of all internally displaced people in the country.
The population of the city, once the region's largest, has decreased by around 62%, the U.N.'s migration agency said.
Civilians say the daily strikes force them to spend most of their time underground, in small makeshift bunkers that families have dug in their backyards.
Satellite imagery shows the RSF has built dozens of kilometers of walls around the city, leaving only a small exit where they are reportedly extorting civilians for safe passage.
The U.N. has repeatedly warned of "large-scale, ethnically driven attacks and atrocities" in the city, where the RSF has overrun multiple famine-hit displacement camps, killing hundreds.
"After 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," U.N. rights chief Volker Türk said Thursday.
