OMDURMAN: When fighting first gripped the Sudanese capital in April 2023, quickly overwhelming Khartoum’s hospitals, Dr. Safaa Ali faced an impossible choice: her family or her patients.
She said she stayed up all night before deciding not to follow her husband to Egypt with her four children.
“I was torn. I could either be with my children or stay and do my duty,” she said.
She has not seen her family since.
Nearly two years into the war between the regular army and the Rapid Support Forces, she is one of the last remaining obstetricians in the capital, risking her life to give Sudanese women a shot at safe births.

We find strength in our love of our country, our passion for our work, and the oath we swore,” she said in a war-damaged delivery room.

Dr. Safaa Ali

“We find strength in our love of our country, our passion for our work, and the oath we swore,” she said in a war-damaged delivery room.
She is one of a cohort of doctors, nurses, technicians, and janitorial staff who met in the last hospitals in Omdurman, Khartoum’s sister city just across the Nile.
Their operating theaters were turned into battlegrounds, their hospitals bombed, and their colleagues killed where they stood. Yet through bombs and bullets, they turned up for their patients every day.
Bothaina Abdelrahman has been a janitor at Omdurman’s Al-Nao hospital for 27 years.
She sheltered with her family in a neighboring district for the first 48 hours of the war but has not missed a day of work since.
“I would walk two hours to the hospital and walk two hours back,” she said at the hospital, mop in hand.
For months, medical personnel have been subjected to routine accusations from combatants that they have been collaborating with the enemy or failing to treat their comrades.
“Health professionals were attacked, kidnapped, killed, and taken hostage for ransom,” said Dr. Khalid Abdelsalam, Khartoum project coordinator for medical charity Doctors Without Borders, or MSF.
Nationwide, up to 90 percent of hospitals in conflict zones have been forced shut, according to Sudan’s doctors’ union, which says at least 78 health workers have been killed since the war began. By October, the World Health Organization had recorded 119 attacks on health facilities.
“At one point, there wasn’t a single working MRI machine in the country” for medical scans, said Abdelsalam.
Despite repeated attacks, Khansa Al-Moatasem heads the 180-person nursing team at Al-Nao, Omdurman’s only hospital functioning throughout the war.
“It’s an honor to give the hospital everything I have and learned,” she said, pink headscarf glowing under the fluorescent lights.
According to MSF, which supports the complex of two-story buildings, Al-Nao has suffered three direct hits since the war began.
A sign reads: “No weapons allowed,” but it frequently goes unheeded at the hospital gates.
After the RSF stormed the nearby maternity hospital early in the war, Dr. Ali, who serves as the hospital’s director, steeled her nerves and went to the paramilitary forces herself.
“I met their field commander and told him this was a women’s hospital, only for them to storm it again the next day with even more fighters,” she recalled.
In July 2023, she watched one of her colleagues die when the hospital was bombed.
Eventually, the hospital was forced to close its doors after its ceilings collapsed, its equipment was looted, and the walls of its delivery rooms were left riddled with bullets.
Dr. Ali set up mobile clinics and a temporary maternity ward at Al-Nao until the Saudi hospital partially reopened this month.
Since army forces recaptured much of Omdurman in early 2024, a semblance of normality has slowly returned, but hospitals have continued to come under attack.
As recently as February, Al-Nao was rocked by RSF shelling as its exhausted doctors raced to treat dozens of casualties from RSF artillery fire on a crowded market.
Those hospitals that still function have been forced to rely increasingly on the help of volunteers from the local Emergency Response Rooms. The neighborhood groups are part of a grassroots aid network delivering frontline aid across Sudan but mainly comprise young Sudanese with few resources.
With no senior physicians left, Dr. Fathia Abdelmajed, a pediatrician for 40 years, has become the “mother” of Al-Buluk Hospital.
For years, she treated patients at home in the Bant neighborhood of Omdurman.
But since November 2023, she has been training teams at the small, overwhelmed hospital, “where hardworking young people were struggling since the start of the war,” Abdelmajed said.
She said the work was often harrowing, but the honor of serving alongside such dedicated volunteers “has made this the highlight of my career.”

TEL AVIV: Thousands of Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv on Saturday against the decision by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service and resume fighting in Gaza.
Netanyahu said this week he had lost confidence in Ronen Bar, who has led Shin Bet since 2021, and intended to fire him effective April 10, prompting three days of protests.
Israel’s Supreme Court issued an injunction on Friday temporarily freezing the dismissal.
Netanyahu has dismissed accusations the decision was politically motivated, but his critics have accused him of undermining the institutions underpinning Israel’s democracy by seeking Bar’s removal.
Israel returned to war in Gaza this week, shattering a ceasefire that saw the exchange of hostages being held by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails and brought respite to the battered enclave.
In Tel Aviv’s Habima Square, protesters waved blue and white Israeli flags and called for a deal that would see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages being held in Gaza.
“The most dangerous enemy of Israel is Benjamin Netanyahu,” protester Moshe Haaharony, 63, told Reuters. “Benjamin Netanyahu, for 20 years, doesn’t care about the country, doesn’t care about the citizens.”
Since the start of the war, there have also been regular protests by families and supporters of hostages seized by Hamas during the October 7 attack that have sometimes echoed the criticisms of the government.
“We are a year and a half later after we had very fierce fighting in Gaza and Hamas is still in power,” protester Erez Berman, 44, told Reuters. “It still has tens of thousands of fighters. So the Israeli government actually failed in getting its own goals out of the war.”
With the resumption of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the fate of 59 hostages, as many as 24 of whom are still believed to be alive, remains unclear and protesters said a return to war could see them either killed by their captors or accidentally by Israeli bombardments.
“We’re going to do whatever it takes to bring the hostages home,” Ophir Falk, Netanyahu’s foreign policy adviser, told Reuters.
“Hamas unfortunately understands military pressure, and only military pressure. In November 2023 we got over 80 hostages out for one reason, military pressure... The only reason they went back to the negotiating table was military pressure. And that’s what we’re doing right now,” Falk said.