A maternity hospital massacre in Sudan has left 460 people dead just days after a 48-hour k!lling spree saw more than 2,000 civilians executed by rebels.
The World Health Organisation said the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher, the city’s last remaining hospital, was on Sunday ‘attacked for the fourth time in a month, k!lling one nurse and injuring three other health workers’.
Two days later, ‘six health workers, four doctors, a nurse and a pharmacist, were abducted’ and ‘more than 460 patients and their companions were reportedly shot and killed in the hospital,’ by Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitaries, the organisation said.
Footage purportedly capturing the aftermath of the hospital massacre showed bodies scattered across the floor among debris and broken equipment.
‘I was performing surgery in the hospital when heavy shelling occurred. A mortar hit the hospital. I was so worried because the woman’s wounds were open, and everyone was running around me,’ Dr Suhiba, a gynaecologist, told UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency.
The northeast African nation was plunged into a deadly conflict in mid-April 2023, over the future of the country between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the head of the paramilitary rebel group.
Following the most recent incident, allies of the army, the Joint Forces, said on Tuesday that the RSF ‘committed heinous crimes against innocent civilians, where more than 2,000 unarmed citizens were executed and killed on October 26 and 27, most of them women, children and the elderly’.
A report published on Monday said the actions of the RSF ‘may be consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity and may rise to the level of genocide’.
Mohammad Hamdan Daglo, the head of the RSF has vowed the country would be unified by ‘peace or through war’.
