Date: 9 October 2025
Location: El Fasher, North Darfur
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have intensified their shelling campaign in El Fasher, North Darfur, over the past week killing and injuring dozens of civilians in successive attacks on hospitals, displacement camps, and residential areas.
According to medical officials, at least 12 civilians were killed and 17 others injured when RSF artillery struck the El Fasher Hospital on Wednesday, October 8. Among the wounded were a female doctor and a nurse, both of whom were on duty at the time of the attack. The Sudan Doctors Network described the strike as a “full-fledged war crime” and a grave violation of international humanitarian law.
The assault came less than 24 hours after another RSF attack on the Saudi Hospital for Women and Maternity and a displacement shelter inside the Old Mosque in Abu Shouk, where hundreds of families had gathered after fleeing earlier violence. Doctors and eyewitnesses reported that over 60 civilians were killed or injured across the two incidents many of them women, children, and the elderly.
“The RSF’s shelling campaign has turned El Fasher into a city under siege,” said one DNHR field monitor. “Hospitals, shelters, and homes are being targeted systematically, leaving civilians with nowhere safe to go.”
These incidents align with findings from DNHR’s latest investigative report, “Every Day Bombs, Hunger, and Loss of Life: Accounts of Forgotten Victims in North Darfur”, which documented patterns of indiscriminate bombing, starvation as a weapon of war, and deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure across North Darfur.
Since May 2024, El Fasher, the last major city in Darfur not under RSF control has been under a near-total blockade. Humanitarian access remains cut off, hospitals are overwhelmed, and markets lie in ruins. The United Nations warns that nearly 400,000 civilians are trapped without food, medicine, or safe passage, while over one million have fled the city since the conflict began.
The Darfur Network for Human Rights (DNHR) urges the African Union Peace and Security Council, the United Nations Security Council, and humanitarian partners to take coordinated action within the coming weeks to end RSF shelling of civilian areas, establish verified humanitarian corridors into El Fasher and Zamzam before December 2025, and support an independent investigation—by the UN Fact-Finding Mission and the ICC into recent attacks as part of a broader accountability process for war crimes in Darfur.
As the violence intensifies, El Fasher stands as both a humanitarian catastrophe and a test of the world’s resolve to uphold the laws of war.📖 Read DNHR’s full report here: Every Day Bombs, Hunger, and Loss of Life: Accounts of Forgotten Victims in North Darfur