PORT SUDAN: Paramilitary shelling of Sudan’s besieged city of El-Fasher, in the western region of Darfur, has killed more than 30 civilians and wounded dozens more, activists said on Monday.

The attack, which took place on Sunday, involved “heavy artillery shelling” and targeted the city’s residential neighborhoods, said the local resistance committee, one of hundreds of volunteer groups coordinating aid across Sudan.

Since April 2023, the war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has killed tens of thousands, uprooted 13 million, and created what the UN describes as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

El-Fasher, the state capital of North Darfur, remains the last major city in the vast Darfur region that the paramilitary group has not conquered.

Last week, the RSF launched a renewed offensive on the city and two nearby displacement camps — Zamzam and Abu Shouk — killing more than 400 people and displacing some 400,000, according to the UN.

In a bloody ground offensive, the RSF took control of Zamzam camp, where aid workers say up to 1 million people were sheltering.

According to the UN, most of the displaced fled just north, to El-Fasher city itself, or 60 km west to the small town of Tawila.

By Thursday, more than 150,000 people had arrived in El-Fasher, while another 180,000 had fled to Tawila, the UN’s migration agency has said.

Humanitarian aid is nearly nonexistent in both famine-threatened towns.

On Monday, the UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, described the situation in the region as “horrifying.”

He said he had spoken by phone with army chief Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his rival paramilitary commander Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, who committed to giving “full access to get aid in.”

Throughout the war, both the army and the RSF have been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war against civilians.

International aid agencies have long warned that a full-scale RSF assault on El-Fasher could lead to devastating urban warfare and a new wave of mass displacement.

UNICEF has described the situation as “hell on earth” for at least 825,000 children trapped in and around El-Fasher.

Following the army’s recapture of the capital Khartoum last month, the RSF has intensified efforts to seize El-Fasher, a strategic target for the paramilitary to consolidate its hold on Darfur.

The RSF already controls nearly all of the vast region, about the size of France, and parts of the south. 

The army holds the country’s center, east, and north.

However, the UN warned of a catastrophic humanitarian situation as the fighting escalated.

“The humanitarian community in Sudan is facing critical and intensifying operational challenges in North Darfur,” Clementine Nkweta-Salami, the UN’s Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Sudan, said on Sunday.

She added that “despite repeated appeals, humanitarian access to El-Fasher and surrounding areas remains dangerously restricted,” warning that the lack of access was increasing the vulnerability of hundreds of thousands of people.”

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders has called for aid airdrops into the city in the face of access restrictions.