Cairo– More than 2 million people in Sudan’s Darfur region have been left without proper medical care A drone attack last week The World Health Organization and a senior aid official say a major hospital was put out of service.
The attack, blamed on the military, killed 70 people and destroyed the Al Dein Teaching Hospital, which served people in East Darfur province. Satellite imagery released on Wednesday showed extensive damage to the hospital.
The army has denied targeting the medical facility, which is in an area controlled by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The group has been fighting against the Sudanese army since April 2023 in a war that has plunged parts of the country into famine and led to mass atrocities.
Bedreldin Abdelnabi, head of humanitarian health care provider Alight’s activities in East Darfur and West Kordofan, said the strike damaged all wards of the hospital, including emergency, medical, surgery, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, and kidney dialysis.
“This facility is now completely out of service,” he said in a testimony shared by the United Nations Population Fund. “This has created a serious gap in access to life-saving health care across the region.”
He says his group is now supporting a primary health care center in the area to help bridge the gap left by the strike.
The facility has served as a referral hospital for more than 2 million people in El Dein city and nine other districts in East Darfur, said Hala Khudari, WHO’s deputy representative in Sudan.
“People may have to travel more than 160 kilometers (100 miles) to reach the next referral hospital, which is very difficult for patients requiring specialized services,” he said.
Those killed in Friday’s strike included 13 children and seven women and also injured 146 people, including patients and their family members, according to WHO, which updated the casualty count on Tuesday. The pediatric, maternity and emergency departments of the hospital were damaged in the attack.
The Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, HRL, said the damage seen in satellite imagery indicated the hospital suffered “multiple precise impacts.”
HRL said the images analyzed showed that at least two areas inside the facility were damaged, with metal tension rods and metal panels caved in from the damaged roof structure. Piles of brick debris were also seen inside the hospital rooms and along the outer wall. A road near the hospital has also been damaged.
According to HRL, there was no visible damage to buildings around the facility, including the police station, indicating that the hospital was “specifically targeted”.
RSF and Sudan war monitoring groups claimed that the army carried out the attack.
Hassan Hamida, who was appointed as the executive director of the RSF-controlled health ministry in East Darfur, told local media that it was a two-hit attack, each 20 minutes apart, on Friday evening.
But the army has denied the allegations two military officers He said the attack was targeted at a nearby police station. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss the matter openly.
U.N. human rights office spokeswoman Marta Hurtado said both warring sides use drones extensively, including in attacks on convoys of commercial transport vehicles that killed 23 people over the weekend in El Dein.
“This underscores the devastating impact of high-tech and relatively cheap weapons in populated areas,” Hurtado said.
The strike was the latest strike on a health care facility in Sudan’s war, which is approaching its third anniversary next month. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said over the weekend that 213 attacks on medical care, including Friday’s strike, had killed more than 2,000 people.
devastating war More than 40,000 people have been killed, according to UN figures, but aid groups say this is an undercount and the real number could be many times higher.
Fighting has recently been concentrated in Darfur and the Kordofan region, where deadly attacks, mostly by drones, have been reported daily. The UN human rights office said more than 500 civilians were killed in drone strikes through mid-March this year.
The war has been marked by mass killings, mass rape and other crimes, which were being investigated by the International Criminal Court as possible war crimes and crimes against humanity. The RSF attack on the Darfur town of al-Dasher in October shows “characteristics of genocide”, according to UN experts.
