GENEVA: UN agency chiefs have demanded unimpeded humanitarian access to deliver aid throughout war-torn Sudan, saying time was running out to prevent widespread famine.

In a joint statement, the heads of multiple UN agencies urged all parties in the conflict to immediately stop denying and obstructing humanitarian actions.
“Let us be clear: If we are prevented from providing aid rapidly and at scale, more people will die,” the statement from the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee said.
“Without an immediate and major step change, we will face a nightmare scenario: A famine will take hold in large parts of the country. More people will flee to neighboring countries in search of sustenance and safety. More children will succumb to disease and malnutrition.”
The joint statement was penned by the UN aid chief Martin Griffiths, along with the heads of the UN agencies for food, health, human rights, refugees, migration, agriculture and children, among others.
The committee is the highest-level humanitarian coordination forum in the UN system, bringing together the heads of 19 organizations, some of which are from outside the UN.
Fighting in Sudan broke out in April last year between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The conflict has killed thousands and sparked a humanitarian disaster.
The statement said 18 million people were acutely hungry, 3.6 million children were acutely malnourished and famine was closing in on millions of people.
Nearly 2 million people have escaped to neighboring countries while millions more are displaced within Sudan.

“Despite the tremendous needs, aid workers continue to face systematic obstructions and deliberate denials of access by parties to the conflict,” said the statement from the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee.
“Aid workers are being killed, injured and harassed, and humanitarian supplies are being looted.”
The statement said movement across conflict lines to parts of Khartoum, Darfur, Al-Jazira and Kordofan had been all but cut off since mid-December.
The UN agency chiefs made a series of demands, including an immediate ceasefire, protection for civilians and an end to human rights violations.
“Facilitate unimpeded humanitarian access through all possible crossline and cross-border routes to allow civilians to receive humanitarian aid. Immediately cease all acts denying, obstructing and interfering with, or politicizing, humanitarian action,” they said.
“Simplify and expedite administrative and bureaucratic procedures related to the delivery of humanitarian aid.”
Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, told a media briefing in Geneva that the conditions for aid delivery were “very, very poor, and it’s very, very dangerous.”
“We want these generals to find a way to solve their differences not by violence that kills, maims, rapes hundreds of thousands of people,” he said.
The UN also said it was concerned by limited donor support, having received only 16 percent of the $2.7 billion it needs for Sudan.

STOCKHOLM: Iran’s Embassy in Stockholm has denied accusations it was recruiting criminal gang members, some of them children, as proxies to commit “acts of violence” against Israeli interests in Sweden.
“Paying attention to the source of this information clearly shows that it is false,” the embassy said in a statement on its website, adding that media coverage based on documents from Israel’s secret services was “false and baseless.”
Tensions have flared between Israel and Iran since the start of the war in Gaza on Oct. 7, and the two states have fought a shadow war of killings and sabotage attacks for years.
On Thursday, Sweden’s intelligence agency said Iran was “using criminal networks in Sweden to carry out acts of violence against other states, groups or people in Sweden that it considers a threat.”
The service, commonly known as Sapo, said these were particularly aimed at “Israeli and Jewish interests, targets and operations in Sweden.”
Several hours before Sapo’s announcement, Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter or DN cited documents from Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad as saying that the heads of two Swedish gangs had both been recruited by the Iranian regime.
“Unfortunately, some Swedish media have quoted the false and baseless claims of media and institutions affiliated with this brutal regime (Israel) and published false and fabricated reports against Iran,” the Iranian Embassy’s statement added.
The embassy said it “expects the Swedish media not to trust the claims and reports published by the Israeli regime” and to work for “an end to the crimes of the Zionist regime in Palestine.”
The diplomatic spat comes two weeks after night-time gunfire was reported outside Israel’s embassy in Stockholm, and three months after police found a live grenade lying on the grounds of the Israeli compound.