Six killed as RSF attack devastates Sudanese hospital in North Kordofan

Obeid hospital suffers severe damage in paramilitary assault, worsening health crisis in Sudan’s civil war.

At least six people have been killed in a suspected drone attack by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on a hospital in southern Sudan, the latest civilian facility targeted in the brutal civil war, officials and rights advocates have said.

The Emergency Lawyers, a rights group, blamed the RSF for the attack on Friday on the Obeid International Hospital, al-Dhaman, in Obeid, the capital city of North Kordofan province. At least 15 others were wounded in the attack, it said.

In a statement on social media, the hospital said the attack resulted in severe damage to its main building. Services at the hospital, the main medical facility serving the region, were suspended until further notice, it said.

A Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) source told the AFP news agency that the bombardment also hit a second hospital in the city centre.

The city is a key staging post on the army’s supply route to the west, where the besieged city of el-Fasher is the only state capital in the vast Darfur region still under the army-led government’s control.

El-Fasher has witnessed attritional fighting between SAF and RSF since May 2024, despite international warnings about the risks of violence in a city that serves as a key humanitarian hub for the five Darfur states.

Since August 2024, Sudan has reported more than 65,000 suspected cholera cases and at least 1,700 deaths across 12 of its 18 states. Khartoum alone has seen 7,700 cases and 185 deaths, including more than 1,000 infections in children under five, as it contends with more than two years of fighting between the army and the RSF.

“Sudan urgently needs an increase in aid to help combat the cholera outbreak, hundreds of cases per day, which has even exceeded the more than 1000 cases per day,” Jean-Nicolas Armstrong Dangelser, Doctors Without Borders’s, known by its French initials MSF, emergency coordinator in Sudan, told media.

“This is only the tip of the iceberg, because nobody has the full picture at the moment, unfortunately,” Dangelser said.

Fighting in the al-Salha district, south of Ondurman, where there was a pocket of people sick with cholera, “greatly contributed” to the spread of the disease, said Dangelser. The army said on May 19 it had seized control of the al-Salha district, considered the last stronghold of the RSF in Khartoum State.

“Now it’s not just the returnees to Khartoum that are exacerbating the situation because of the devastated water system and the lack of healthcare, but it’s also now spreading to Darfur, where people have been displaced by fighting,” Dangelser added.

Cholera outbreak

Violence and death follow Sudanese fleeing the war beyond their country’s borders. On Friday, 11 Sudanese refugees and a Libyan driver were killed in a car crash in the desert in Libya, according to local authorities.

Since fighting between the RSF and SAF broke out in April 2023, the UN has said 11 million people have been forced out of their homes, including 250,000 who have escaped into neighbouring Libya.