Members of the International Committee of the Red Cross speak with newly arrived refugees about health issues at the Oure Cassoni refugee camp in Chad, on Feb. 24.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
At least 64 people were killed when a drone struck a hospital in East Darfur, adding to the rapidly mounting death toll from attacks on health facilities in Sudan’s three-year war, the World Health Organization says.
Thirteen children were among those killed, along with two nurses, a doctor and multiple patients, while a further 89 people were injured and several hospital departments were damaged, according to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who posted photos of extensive wreckage and rubble.
“In an instant, a place of healing was turned into a scene of devastation,” Hanan Balkhy, a regional director for the WHO, said in a statement on the weekend.
The attack on the hospital is part of a much larger pattern across the country. More than 2,000 people have been killed and hundreds injured in attacks on clinics and hospitals since the Sudan war began, Dr. Tedros said.
“Health care should never be a target,” he said in a social-media post on Saturday night. “Enough blood has been spilled. Enough suffering has been inflicted.”
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He did not identify the perpetrators of the drone attack, but Sudanese media and civil-society activists said the attack was launched by the Sudanese military. The army denied the reports.
The hospital is in El Daein, capital of East Darfur region, a city controlled by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been battling the Sudan army since the war began in April, 2023. The attack has forced the hospital to shut its doors, leaving thousands of people without access to health care, the WHO said.
Sudan’s war is widely considered to be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands of civilians killed. Envoys from the Trump administration have been pushing for a humanitarian truce for the past several months, without success.
More than 12 million people across Sudan have been forced to flee their homes, and 33 million need emergency aid, according to relief agency estimates. Both sides in the war have been accused of war crimes and other atrocities. Human-rights groups and the United States government have concluded that the RSF has committed genocide in a series of ethnically targeted massacres in Darfur.
The RSF controls almost all of Darfur, but the Sudanese army has been pushing in from the east, trying to make gains in the region.
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United Nations human-rights chief Volker Türk said on March 12 that he was appalled by the rising toll from drone attacks in Sudan, which have reportedly killed more than 200 civilians this month alone in the Kordofan and White Nile regions.
“It is deeply troubling that despite multiple reminders, warnings and appeals, parties to the conflict in Sudan continue to use increasingly powerful drones to deploy explosive weapons with wide-area impacts in populated areas,” he said in a statement.
The drone attacks have hit many homes, schools, markets and health facilities across the country, he said.
The war is also spilling across Sudan’s borders. In the east, there are widespread reports that Ethiopia is providing logistical help to the RSF, allowing it to mobilize on Ethiopian territory. And last week the war crossed Sudan’s western border into Chad when a drone strike killed 19 people on the Chadian side of Tiné, a border town.
Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Déby said the drone strike was an “outrageous and excessive aggression” against his country. He ordered the closing of the border and told his army to prepare a possible retaliatory strike.
The Sudanese military has accused Chad of allowing the RSF to use the country as a weapons supply route.
Tiné, which has people on both sides of the border, is a key route for humanitarian convoys entering Sudan. It is one of the last remaining towns in Darfur that the RSF does not control.
“Sudanese armed groups are waging hit-and-run attacks across the Chad-Sudan border, resulting in hundreds of casualties, disrupting border trade and cross-border humanitarian operations,” said a report on Saturday by the Sudan War Monitor, an independent research group.