PORT SUDAN: Attacks by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces on one of the last functioning hospitals in the besieged city of El-Fasher killed 20 people within 24 hours, medical sources said on Wednesday.
Those killed included two health workers, their colleagues at El-Fasher Hospital — one of the city’s last functioning health facilities — said.
The RSF is mounting its fiercest assault yet on El-Fasher as it seeks to seize the city from their rivals, the regular army.
Activists say El-Fasher, the last state capital in the vast western region of Darfur to elude the paramilitary’s grasp, has become “an open-air morgue” for starved civilians.
The strikes on Tuesday and Wednesday caused “significant damage to hospital buildings” and wounded a combined 24 people.
On Tuesday, a drone strike hit the maternity ward, killing eight people.
The artillery attack on Wednesday killed 12 more.
Most hospitals in El-Fasher have been repeatedly bombed and forced to shut, leaving nearly 80 percent of the city in need of medical care but unable to access it, according to the UN.
Across the country, hospitals have been routinely attacked, stormed by fighters and looted, with the doctors’ union saying 90 percent of hospitals have at some point been forced shut.
Dozens of health workers have been reported killed, including in what the UN says have been targeted attacks.
In El-Fasher, exhausted medical teams are already scrambling to treat the injured from daily attacks.
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.
More than 1 million people have fled El-Fasher since the war began, accounting for 10 percent of all internally displaced people in the country, according to the latest figures released by the UN.
