\n<\/p>\n
Sudan faces a \u201cmassive\u201d humanitarian aid crisis, with millions of starving people being denied access to vital food supplies as fighting rages in the war-torn country, the World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.<\/p>\n
WFP Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau told Al Jazeera on Sunday that his organisation was assisting five million people across the nation, including two million in hard-to-reach areas, but it was not enough.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n \u201cThe needs are massive. We\u2019re talking about 20 million people acutely food insecure, some six million in starvation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a massive crisis, and what we\u2019re able to do, which is important, isn\u2019t enough.\u201d<\/p>\n He said the organisation had \u201ctried every way possible\u201d to get aid to populations in need, including air drops, digital cash transfers and stationing convoys outside besieged areas.<\/p>\n But it had not been possible in violence-ridden areas like el-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, which was under an 18-month siege before it fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in October, or the West Kordofan city of Babnusa, which the RSF claimed to have gained control of last week.<\/p>\n The government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) has denied that Babnusa has fallen.<\/p>\n Skau said global attention needed to focus on the Kordofan region, where fighting has been intensifying between SAF and the RSF for weeks.<\/p>\n His warning follows similar comments from the United Nations human rights chief Volker Turk, who said on Thursday that the Kordofan region could face a wave of mass atrocities similar to the widespread killings documented in el-Fasher, which fell to the RSF last month.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fighting there is intensifying, and they\u2019re also besieged areas,\u201d said Skau.<\/p>\n \u201cWorld attention needs to be on Sudan now, and diplomatic efforts need to be stepped up in order to prevent the same disaster we saw in el-Fasher.\u201d<\/p>\n Before el-Fasher fell in November, the UN issued urgent warnings about potential atrocities, but those alerts went largely unheeded. After the city\u2019s capture, mass killings ensued, with corpses visible from satellite imagery, prompting UN chief Antonio Guterres to describe it as a \u201ccrime scene\u201d.<\/p>\n Famine conditions have already been confirmed\u00a0in areas in the Darfur and Kordofan regions.<\/p>\n Speaking at the Doha Forum on Sunday, Sudan\u2019s Justice Minister Abdullah Dirife criticised the aid supplied by UN groups in Sudan, and said international focus should be on stopping external support to the RSF from the United Arab Emirates.<\/p>\n Dirife was responding to a question from audience member Jeremy Purvis, a member of the United Kingdom\u2019s House of Lords, asking why aid was continuing to be blocked from reaching civilians in Sudan, and starvation \u201cused as an act of war\u201d.<\/p>\n The RSF accused Sudan\u2019s military on Friday of bombing the Adre border crossing with Chad, a crossing that has been vital for humanitarian aid delivery during the war, in what it said was a deliberate attempt to hinder relief efforts.<\/p>\n Dirife said Sudan had opened crossings and granted more than 12,000 entry visas to humanitarian workers to assist in relief efforts.<\/p>\n \u201cHowever, what was presented from UN agencies on the humanitarian side is something shameful and embarrassing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a failure from the UN agencies,\u201d he added. \u201cThe Sudanese government has done everything that can be done to facilitate humanitarian aid to the Sudanese people.\u201d<\/p>\n He said the key to stopping the suffering of the Sudanese people was to put an end to the UAE\u2019s support for the RSF. The UAE has long rejected accusations it is arming the RSF.<\/p>\n Rosemary DiCarlo, UN undersecretary-general for political and peacebuilding affairs, told the Doha Forum that the international organisation\u2019s \u201cwhole focus\u201d in the war in Sudan had been on the protection of civilians.<\/p>\n But while some efforts had been successful, most were not.<\/p>\n \u201cIt has been extremely difficult to instil in the parties the need to leave civilians alone,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n On Saturday, an official in South Kordofan\u2019s Kalogi locality told Al Jazeera that at least 116 people had been killed in an RSF attack on a preschool and other sites on Thursday, including 46 children who attended the preschool.<\/p>\n The Sudanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the attack in a statement as a \u201cfull-fledged massacre\u201d, saying the RSF had targeted the preschool directly with missiles from a drone, before bombing it again while the locals were trying to rescue the wounded, then pursuing the wounded and the paramedics inside a hospital.<\/p>\n The executive director of the Kalogi locality said the high death toll in the attack was due to the severity of the injuries sustained, while some families avoided taking injured loved ones to the hospital for treatment because of attacks on the facility.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the Sudan Doctors Network said it had documented 19 cases of rape committed by RSF personnel against women in the al-Afad camp in al-Dabbah who had fled the fighting in el-Fasher.<\/p>\n The group said two of the survivors, situated in Sudan\u2019s Northern State, were pregnant and were receiving \u201dspecial healthcare under the supervision of local medical teams\u201d.<\/p>\n It said it \u201cstrongly condemns the gang rape\u201d by the RSF men, which was a violation of international law, and warned that \u201cthe silence of the international community regarding these heinous practices encourages their repetition\u201d.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, a SAF source told Al Jazeera that air defences had intercepted RSF drones in al-Damazin in Sudan\u2019s southern Blue Nile state, while a government source said electricity had been cut off in the city due to shelling of a power station.<\/p>\n The UN says violence in Sudan has displaced nine million people and left more than 30 million in need of aid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sudan faces a \u201cmassive\u201d humanitarian aid crisis, with millions of starving people being denied access to vital food supplies as fighting rages in the war-torn country, the World Food Programme (WFP) has warned. WFP Deputy Executive Director Carl Skau told Al Jazeera on Sunday that his organisation was assisting five million people across the nation, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4639,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
Focus needed on Kordofan region<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"