At least 64 people have been killed in an attack on a teaching hospital in Sudan’s western Darfur region, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said, the latest assault targeting the country’s healthcare facilities.
The attack killed multiple patients, including 13 children, as well as two nurses and a doctor, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, said on social media on Saturday.
Tedros did not say who was responsible for the violence Friday at the Al Daein Teaching Hospital, which carries the name of the capital of East Darfur, one of five states that make up the Darfur region.
Nearly three years of civil war in Sudan between the Rapid Support Forces and the army has spiralled into a humanitarian crisis. In the past year, some of the most intense violence has been concentrated in the Darfur region.
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The Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group, are descended from the lawless Janjaweed, predominantly Arab militias that terrorised Darfur in the early 2000s, when they were accused of committing genocide. The same ethnic rivalries that fuelled the chaos in Darfur two decades ago are still at work in the violence today.
The Rapid Support Forces and the army have both denied responsibility for the attack on the teaching hospital, each blaming the other instead.
The attack also injured 89 people, including eight staff members, and damaged the emergency department as well as the hospital’s paediatric and maternity sections, Tedros said. The teaching hospital is “currently non-functional due to the extensive damage caused by the attack”, he added.
The attacks on healthcare facilities during the conflict have deprived communities of emergency and routine medical care. Since the start of the war in Sudan, 2,036 people have been killed in 231 healthcare related attacks, Tedros said.
“Health care should never be a target,” he said.
The Rapid Support Forces blamed the Sudanese army for the attack, condemning in a statement what it called a “systematic pattern of targeting innocent civilians and civil facilities, foremost among them healthcare facilities.”
The Sudanese armed forces dismissed those claims, saying in a statement that attacking hospitals and healthcare facilities was “characteristic” of the support forces.
The two sides have been fighting since April 2023 in a conflict that has created one of the world’s largest continuing humanitarian crises.
In October, the World Health Organisation said it had received reports that more than 450 people had been massacred in the last functioning hospital in el-Fasher, a city in North Darfur.
While the health organisation did not specify who was responsible for the el-Fasher killings, it noted that they occurred a few days after the Rapid Support Forces seized control of the city.
This year, the United Nations attributed the killings directly to the paramilitary group, saying in a report that evidence from the massacre bore the “hallmarks of genocide.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
