At least 70 people were killed after a drone strike targeted the last functioning hospital in the besieged capital of Sudan’s North Darfur state late Friday, according to local officials and the World Health Organization.
At the time of the attack, the hospital was “packed with patients receiving care,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Saturday, with Sudan’s foreign ministry saying that the victims of the strike were primarily women and children.
The attack on the Saudi Teaching Maternal Hospital in El Fasher marks the latest escalation in a string of violence in Sudan’s 20-month civil war – a brutal power tussle between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) that has triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and has killed more than 20,000 people and displaced over 11 million others, according to the United Nations.
Friday’s airstrike is one of many attacks that have resulted in multiple civilian casualties. Last month, more than 100 people were killed after bombs hit a crowded market in Kabkabiya, a town in North Darfur.
Ghebreyesus did not name who was responsible for Friday’s attack.
The SAF and the RSF, both headed by two of Sudan’s most powerful generals, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – also known as Hemedti – frequently accuse each other of carrying out drone attacks on civilian areas.
Darfur Governor Mini Minnawi blamed the RSF for the hospital attack, saying: “It exterminated all the patients who were inside it.”
Sudan’s foreign ministry also accused the RSF of the strike, describing the attack as a massacre.
“More than 70 civilians receiving treatment, most of them women and children, were victims of the massacre when the militia attacked the hospital’s accident department with drones,” it said in a statement.
The Saudi hospital, El Fasher’s remaining public facility with the capacity to perform surgery and treat the wounded, has previously come under fire. Last August, a patient carer was killed when an air strike hit the hospital’s surgical ward. Five others were injured in that attack.
The RSF controls large swathes of Darfur, including much of the country’s western and central regions as it viciously competes for control of the region with the Sudanese military. El Fasher is the last major town in Darfur yet to be captured by the RSF.
WHO chief Ghebreyesus said Friday’s hospital attack is making life for people in the region even more difficult as it “comes at a time when access to health care is already severely constrained” in North Darfur “due to the closure of health facilities following intense bombardments.”
Ghebreyesus called on warring parties to cease fighting and to leave Sudan’s health facilities alone, adding that, “above all, Sudan’s people need peace. The best medicine is peace.”