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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.

GENEVA: Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) called on Friday for a controversial Israel- and US-backed relief effort in Gaza to be halted, branding it “slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid.”
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which began operating last month, “is degrading Palestinians by design, forcing them to choose between starvation or risking their lives for minimal supplies,” MSF said in a statement.
It said more than 500 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip while seeking food in recent weeks.
Starting in March, Israel blocked deliveries of food and other crucial supplies into Gaza for more than two months, leading to warnings of that the entire population of the occupied Palestinian territory is at risk of famine.
The United Nations says Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is illegal under international law.
The densely populated Gaza Strip has been largely flattened by Israeli bombing since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas.
Israel began allowing food supplies to trickle in at the end of May, using GHF — backed by armed US contractors, with Israeli troops on the perimeter — to run operations.
The latter have been marred by chaotic scenes and near-daily reports of Israeli forces firing on people desperate to get food.
There are also concerns about the neutrality of GHF, officially a private group with opaque funding.
The UN and major aid groups have refused to work with it, citing concerns it serves Israeli military goals and that it violates basic humanitarian principles.
The Gaza health ministry says that since late May, nearly 550 people have been killed near aid centers while seeking scarce food supplies.
“With over 500 people killed and nearly 4,000 wounded while seeking food, this scheme is slaughter masquerading as humanitarian aid and must be immediately dismantled,” MSF said.
GHF has denied that fatal shootings have occurred in the immediate vicinity of its aid points.
On Tuesday, the United Nations condemned what it said was Israel’s “weaponization of food” in Gaza and called it a war crime.
MSF said the way GHF distributes food aid supplies “forces thousands of Palestinians, who have been starved by an over 100 day-long Israeli siege, to walk long distances to reach the four distribution sites and fight for scraps of food supplies.”
“These sites hinder women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities from accessing aid, and people are killed and wounded in the chaotic process,” it said.
Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Gaza, said the four sites were all under the full control of Israeli forces, surrounded by watch points and barbed wire.
“If people arrive early and approach the checkpoints, they get shot. If they arrive on time but there is an overflow and they jump over the mounds and the wires, they get shot,” he said in the statement.
“If they arrive late, they shouldn’t be there because it is an ‘evacuated zone’ — they get shot.”
MSF said that its teams in Gaza were seeing patients every day who had been killed or wounded trying to get food at one of the sites.
It pointed to “a stark increase in the number of patients with gunshot wounds.”
MSF urged “the Israeli authorities and their allies to lift the siege on food, fuel, medical and humanitarian supplies and to revert to the pre-existing principled humanitarian system coordinated by the UN.”