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KHARTOUM: Paramilitary shelling of the besieged Darfur city of El-Fasher in western Sudan killed 13 people including 3 children on Friday, a medical source told AFP as the United Nations announced it was seeking to secure a humanitarian pause in the city.
“Another 21 people were injured due to the artillery shelling from the Rapid Support militia,” the source said, referring to the Rapid Support Forces, at war with the regular army since April 2023.
The RSF has besieged the North Darfur state capital since May of last year and has launched repeated attacks in an attempt to seize the city of an estimated million people.
The strike came hours after Sudan’s ruling Transitional Sovereignty Council said army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan’s office had agreed in a phone call with UN chief Antonio Guterres to a “week-long humanitarian truce in El-Fasher to support UN efforts and facilitate aid access to thousands of besieged civilians.”
Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Friday said “we are making contacts with both sides with that objective.”
The UN has repeatedly warned of the plight of trapped civilians in the city, where hunger has pushed families to survive on eating leaves and peanut shells as nearly no aid is allowed in.
Civilians report soaring prices and a near-total absence of health facilities, nearly all of which have been forced shut by the fighting.
A World Food Programme facility inside El-Fasher was damaged from repeated RSF shelling last month, and in early June five aid workers were killed in an attack on a UN convoy seeking to supply the city.
The paramilitary has repeatedly attacked the city and its surrounding famine-hit displacement camps, killing hundreds of civilians and pushing hundreds of thousands of already displaced people to flee.
UNICEF has described the situation as “hell on earth” for at least 825,000 children trapped in and around El-Fasher.
The RSF conquered nearly all of the vast western region of Darfur in the early months of the war, but has been unable to seize North Darfur state capital El-Fasher despite besieging the city for over a year.
An RSF source told AFP Friday the paramilitary had not received a ceasefire proposal.
Aid sources say an official famine declaration is impossible given the lack of access to data, but mass starvation has already taken hold of the city.
Over a million people are on the brink of famine in North Darfur, according to the latest available UN figures.
Of the 10 million people currently internally displaced in Sudan — the world’s largest displacement crisis — nearly 20 percent are in North Darfur.

JERUSALEM: Israel’s Military Advocate General has ordered an investigation into possible war crimes over allegations that Israeli forces deliberately fired at Palestinian civilians near Gaza aid distribution sites, Haaretz newspaper reported on Friday.
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed over the past month in the vicinity of areas where food was being handed out, local hospitals and officials have said.
Haaretz, a left-leaning Israeli newspaper, quoted unnamed Israeli soldiers as saying they were told to fire at the crowds to keep them back, using unnecessary lethal force against people who appeared to pose no threat.
The military told Reuters that the Israel Defense Forces had not instructed soldiers to deliberately shoot at civilians. It added that it was looking to improve “the operational response” in the aid areas and had recently installed new fencing and signs, and opened additional routes to reach the handout zones.
Haaretz quoted unnamed sources as saying that the army unit established to review incidents that may involve breaches of international law had been tasked with examining soldiers’ actions near aid locations over the past month.
The military told Reuters that some incidents were being reviewed by relevant authorities.
It added: “Any allegation of a deviation from the law or IDF directives will be thoroughly examined, and further action will be taken as necessary.”
There is an acute shortage of food and other basic supplies after the nearly two-year-old military campaign by Israel against Hamas militants in Gaza that has reduced much of the enclave to rubble and displaced most of its two million inhabitants.
Thousands of people gather around distribution centers desperately awaiting the next deliveries, but there have been near daily reports of shootings and killings on the approach routes. Medics said six people were killed by gunfire on Friday as they sought to get food in southern Gaza Strip.
In all, more than 500 people have died near aid centers operated by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) or in areas where UN food trucks were set to pass since late May, the Gaza health authorities have said.
The unnamed Israeli soldiers told Haaretz that military commanders had ordered troops to shoot at the crowds of Palestinians to disperse them and clear the area.
During a closed-door meeting with senior Military Advocate General officials this week, legal representatives rejected IDF claims that the incidents were isolated cases, Haaretz reported.
There has been widespread confusion about access to the aid, with the army imposing for a time a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew on approach routes to GHF sites. But locals often have to set out well before dawn to have any chance of retrieving food.
The Gaza war began when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, killing nearly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 others hostage into the enclave.
In response, Israel launched a military campaign that has killed more than 56,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, according to local health authorities in Gaza.
The Gaza health ministry said on Friday that at least 72 people were killed and more than 170 wounded by Israeli fire across Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours.