The besieged residents of El-Fasher City face famine, the UN warns

The United Nations Food Agency warned that families trapped in the Sudanese city besieged in El-Fasher are faced with famine.

The World Food Program (WFP) said that it had not been able to deliver food to the city of the western Darfur region for over a year.

El -Fasher is surrounded by paramilitary fighters of the rapid support forces (RSF) for almost 16 months – determined to seize the army of Sudan.

The WFP warning occurs while local activists have already started to report deaths by famine in the city, which still houses around 300,000 people.

Sudan was plunged into a civil war in April 2023 after a vicious power struggle broke out between the army and its former ally, the RSF – creating one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.

The United Nations Children’s Agency (UNICEF) also published a declaration saying that malnutrition is widespread across the country, with many children “reduced to skin and bones”.

The WFP warning echoes a recent attraction for the urgent support of the Governor of Darfur in North Al-Hafiz Bakhit, who said that the life situation in El-Fasher had become unbearable.

Bakhit is aligned with the military government of Sudan, which is trying to maintain control of the city, its last foot in Darfur.

The Battle of the RSF to seize El-Fasher of the Sudanese army has intensified in recent months, after the paramilitaries have been driven out of the capital, Khartoum.

United Nations statistics in early July showed that 38% of children under the age of five in camps for people displaced inside inside and near El-Fasher suffered from acute malnutrition.

PAM said severe food shortages had considerably increased the prices of rare supplies to El-Fasher, and have cited information that people ate fodder of animals and food waste to try to survive.

The agency did not appoint the responsible party – but the RSF reduced commercial roads and blocked the supply lines to the city.

“Everyone in El-Fasher faces a daily struggle to survive,” said Eric Percet, regional Director of PAM for East and Southern Africa.

“People’s adaptation mechanisms have been completely exhausted by more than two years of war. Without immediate and sustained access, lives will be lost,” he added.

The agency cited an eight -year -old girl, Sondos, who had fled the city with five family members.

“In El-Fasher, there was a lot of bombing and hunger. Only hunger and bombs,” said the girl, adding that the family had only survived the millet.

PAM said that he had trucks responsible for helping food and nutrition ready to leave and had received authorization from the Sudanese government to go to El-Fasher.

He is still waiting for the word of the RSF on the question of whether it would support a break in the fights to allow goods in the city.

The UN is pushing for a humanitarian truce for a week since early June, when a United Nations convoy on the way to El -Fasher was attacked – with the army and the RSF blaming itself for the strike.

The Sudan State news agency reported that the head of the armed forces, General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan-the country’s de facto chief-had accepted the temporary ceasefire.

The RSF did not officially respond. However, reports citing RSF advisers said the group had rejected the initiative because it thought that the truce would be used to facilitate the delivery of food and ammunition to the “besieged militias of Burhan” inside El-Fasher.

They also said that the RSF and its allies set up “safe itineraries” so that civilians leave the city.

Last month, the International Organization for Migration (OIM) said that more than a million people had fled El-Fasher since the start of the conflict, including those of the neighboring Zamzam camp which was seized by the RSF in April.

The BBC heard first-hand accounts on their desperate flight compared to the intensified bomb of El-Fasher and the attacks by RSF allied gangs on the road.

PAM said that it had made modest progress in the supply of food aid to certain other parts of the Darfur, but said that these fragile gains were likely to be reversed when the roads were closed by the next rainy season.

Sudan representative of UNICEF, Sheldon Yett, also said that certain conditions were slowly improved in the regions of the Sudan center, which had recently become accessible to Haid workers after the Sudanese army led RSF fighters.

But he said the resources have been extended to the limit due to recent financing reductions, which apparently referring to the radical decline in the US administration Donald Trump.

“It’s an imminent disaster,” he said.

“We are on the point of irreversible damage to a whole generation of children, not because we do not have the knowledge or tools to save them, but because we do not manage to act with the urgency, and at the level of this crisis requires. We need access to these children.”