Sudan

WFP says 900,000 people are losing food aid in Sudan as 19.5 million face acute hunger. Most remaining recipients get half rations amid funding shortages.

Two in three child casualties in Sudan this year were killed by armed drones, UNICEF told reporters in Geneva this week — an estimated 270 of 410 children killed or injured between January and September 2026, with more than 1,100 people killed in drone attacks in the first half of the year alone, according to AFP. The drones have changed character over twelve months, from the 'suicide' models of several years ago to accurate long-range weapons travelling up to 1,500 kilometres, and in the last week of October not a single day passed without a drone strike on a Sudanese power station. This explainer sets out what the UN has documented, how the power strikes cascade into water, food and disease, and why attribution is the war's open question.

Sudan drone strikes on energy and fuel infrastructure have stranded hundreds of aid trucks, stopped dialysis treatment for 25 people at a hospital outside Khartoum and left fuel queues kilometres long in the capital, the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator Denise Brown told UN News, describing an intense pattern of attacks over the past couple of weeks that appears to target civilian infrastructure systematically.

Sudan said late Sunday it had filed complaints against Ethiopia with the UN Security Council and the African Union's Peace and Security Council, after a Sudanese report alleged 70 RSF drone attacks launched from Ethiopian territory since February — attacks Khartoum says killed or wounded 484 civilians — an allegation Ethiopia has denied.

Senior Rapid Support Forces commander Siddiq Ander has defected from Sudan's paramilitary group, Al Jazeera reported on Friday, accusing relatives of RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, of tightly controlling the group's finances, weapons, troop movements and military promotions. Ander's accusations are published here as his own claims, in his own words; his exit is the latest in a string of senior RSF defections this year, several of them made alongside hundreds of fighters.

A drone strike on a busy market in Nyala, the capital of Sudan's South Darfur, at about 8 p.m. on Monday killed more than 100 people and injured 113, Emergency Lawyers, a Sudanese rights group tracking violence in the war, said in a statement on Tuesday, blaming the Sudanese military. The toll is not reconciled: the MSF-supported Nyala Teaching Hospital received 36 bodies — 21 of them in civilian clothing — and saw more than 150 wounded, while a medic told AFP 21 people were killed and more than 40 injured. No Sudanese Armed Forces response appears in the reporting opened.

The United Kingdom on Monday, October 26, 2026 sanctioned 15 senior commanders from both the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for suspected atrocities, including conflict-related sexual violence, during and after the fall of El Fasher, and announced £5 million for survivors of sexual violence and £10 million in humanitarian funding. The announcement, made one year after El Fasher fell following an eighteen-month siege, follows UK-funded Centre for Information Resilience reporting that the siege tactics used there — systematic starvation, sexual violence, drone attacks on civilian infrastructure and obstruction of aid — are still being deployed across Sudan by both sides.

One year after the Rapid Support Forces captured El Fasher, fewer than 70,000 people remain in a city whose pre-war population was more than one million, Amnesty International said in new testimony from 25 civilians interviewed in August and September 2026. A BBC investigation documented at least 43 attacks on hospitals and health sites between May 2024 and October 2025, and 55 medical workers killed.

Sudan's famine risk is growing as an El Niño-driven drought — the driest peak rainy season in more than three decades — compounds more than three years of civil war, the UN-backed IPC hunger monitor warned on October 12. Rainfall from July to September was the lowest since 1984 in North Darfur, the IPC said 5.1 million people already faced severe hunger in June, and the World Food Programme forecasts 350,000 more people in severe hunger by the end of 2026 and 1.2 million more by August 2027, Reuters reported after interviewing farmers, traders and aid officials across the country.

Drone strikes in Sudan's West Kordofan state on Sunday evening killed 150 people — 145 of them when a truck carrying mourners to a funeral was hit at Al-Dabab — sources told the Sudan War Observatory, the BBC reported on Tuesday, a toll nearly double the count reported for the same town a day earlier. Together with the 73 killed at Abyei's Amiet market on Monday, the reported deaths pass 200. The BBC's figures conflict in both toll and detail with the AFP-based reporting published on Monday, and neither count has been independently verified.

A wave of drone strikes across Sudan has killed more than 160 people since Friday, according to medics and rights groups reporting on Monday — 80 of them in a single Sunday-evening strike on a transport hub near a market in Al-Dibab, West Kordofan, and three children in a Monday strike on a house near Khartoum's airport. The United Nations condemned the attacks on Monday, saying drones are killing civilians, including children, and disrupting essential services.

Drones caused roughly 1,100 of the 1,400 civilian deaths recorded in Sudan in the first half of 2026, UN figures presented to the Security Council showed, as the UN's political chief told ambassadors on Friday that neither the army nor the RSF is moving toward dialogue and both believe they can gain on the battlefield. Twenty million people face acute hunger, a drone strike near the Ethiopian border killed 41 displaced people on October 10, and the Council's arms embargo remains confined to Darfur.

The risk of famine is growing across Sudan's Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan as war, displacement and an El Niño drought combine, the UN-backed IPC hunger monitor warned on Monday. Thirteen of 17 nutrition surveys in Greater Darfur since January found critical malnutrition, more than 300,000 people have fled Greater Kordofan since October 2025, and less than half of Sudan's humanitarian appeal was funded as of October 8.

A drone strike on Friday in Sudan's southeastern Blue Nile state killed at least 30 displaced people — 26 women and four children — the provincial governor told Al Jazeera, blaming the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. A rights group put the toll at 41, as the United Nations condemned the attack on a displacement camp near the Ethiopian border.

Sudan's civil war, which erupted in Khartoum in April 2023, pits the Sudanese Armed Forces against the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary. Three and a half years on, the war has displaced 14 million people, split the country east to west, and turned the Kordofan region into its central battleground — while the army chief vows to retake 'every inch' of territory.

The UN World Food Programme condemned an aerial attack that killed a driver of two clearly marked aid trucks in Sudan's South Kordofan, calling for a prompt investigation. The incident lands as a senior U.S. envoy met Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in Egypt — while Burhan publicly vows to keep fighting the RSF.

Sudan's army says it captured the strategic town of al-Mazroub in North Kordofan on Friday and dealt a 'knockout blow' to the RSF and SPLM-N in Blue Nile state on Saturday. The RSF still controls almost all of Darfur, and the humanitarian catastrophe — 19.5 million facing acute hunger — is deepening regardless of who holds the map.

The Sudan Doctors Network said a drone strike attributed to the RSF killed at least 24 people, including eight children, when a vehicle carrying displaced families was hit near Rahad in North Kordofan on Saturday — a day after a separate drone attack on a WFP aid convoy killed one and wounded several, according to the UN's humanitarian coordinator in Sudan.

The Sudanese Armed Forces announced on October 2 that they had taken al-Mazroub, the administrative capital of West Bara Locality, in their monthslong North Kordofan offensive. Geolocated video reviewed by the Sudan War Monitor confirms army and allied units inside the town; the RSF has not publicly responded.

The Sudanese army chief refused Washington's reported condition — a 90-day ceasefire in exchange for a UN visa — and told a Khartoum rally his goal is to 'eliminate this militia, no matter the cost.'

More than three years into Sudan's civil war, nearly 20 million people face acute hunger, 14 million are displaced, and aid funding is running dry. Here is the anatomy of the Sudan humanitarian crisis.

Drone attacks attributed to the RSF have shut down hospitals, water stations and power in El Obeid — while military sources report an unprecedented buildup of fighters from Darfur and West Kordofan ahead of a possible ground offensive.

The Rapid Support Forces have stepped up drone strikes on government-held towns in North Kordofan — including a courtroom and a college — as fears grow that El Obeid could face the fate of El Fasher.