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The head of the World Health Organization has condemned an attack on a hospital in Sudan that he said had killed more than 40 civilians, as the country’s civil war, which has caused the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, rages on.
The attack on al-Mujlad hospital in West Kordofan happened on Saturday close to the frontline between the Sudanese military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The WHO’s local office, which did not assign blame, said six children and five health workers were among the dead and that there were “dozens of injuries”.
The RSF and Sudan’s armed forces have been fighting since April 2023, when a power struggle broke out into open warfare in the capital, Khartoum. Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than 12 million displaced, 4 million of them to outside the country. More than 20 million are in need of food aid and areas of the country are in famine.
The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said in a post on X: “We cannot say this louder: attacks on health must stop everywhere!”
The RSF said in a statement on its website that the armed forces were responsible for Saturday’s attack. “The Rapid Support Forces strongly condemn and denounce the barbaric aggression … This attack constitutes a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law, including the 1949 Geneva conventions, which explicitly prohibit the targeting of health facilities and personnel,” it said.
The news site Darfur 24 cited the West Kordofan Emergency Response Rooms, part of a network of Sudanese grassroots humanitarian groups, as saying the attack was an airstrike carried out using a Sudanese military plane. Emergency Lawyers, a group that documents abuses by both sides in the war, said the hospital was hit by a military drone.
Nabil Abdallah, a spokesperson for Sudan’s military, said the allegations were false. “Sudanese armed forces do not violate international law and do not target civilians, but target the places of militia gatherings everywhere as legitimate targets, against facilities used by the militia for military purposes,” Abdallah said.
“These are lies and propaganda aimed at blaming false charges [on] the Sudanese state and its armed forces and [are] part of the regional and international conspiracy against Sudan.”
The United Nations’ children’s agency, Unicef, said in an X post: “The attacks do not only kill and injure but also severely impede the communities’ ability to receive life-saving services. We urge the government and all parties to the conflict to uphold their obligations under international humanitarian law. The attacks and violence must end now.”
In January, 70 people were killed in an attack on what was then the only functional hospital in the besieged city of El Fasher, in the Darfur region. The attack was blamed on the RSF.
In March, Sudan’s armed forces recaptured the presidential palace as they asserted control over Khartoum. Meanwhile, the RSF consolidated their dominance over the western region of Darfur, where their predecessors, the Janjaweed Arab militias, were accused of committing genocide against non-Arab tribes in 2004.
Earlier this month, a UN aid convoy came under attack, with five people killed, as it tried to bring supplies to El Fasher, which has been under siege by the RSF for more than a year.
Virginia Gamba, the UN secretary general’s special adviser on the prevention of genocide, told the UN Human Rights Council on Monday: “Both parties have committed serious human rights violations.”
She said: “RSF and allied armed Arab militias continue to conduct ethnically motivated attacks against the Zaghawa, Masalit and Fur groups. The risk of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sudan remains very high.”
