Just days after reports emerged of paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) executing 2,000 civilians in a horrific 48-hour killing spree in El-Fasher, Sudan, claims of a new atrocity are beginning to emerge. A maternity hospital, the city’s last remaining hospital, was “attacked for the fourth time in a month, killing one nurse and injuring three other health workers,” on Sunday (October 27), according to the WHO.

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 RSF paramilitaries, the agency said. Footage said to have captured the aftermath of the hospital massacre showed bodies scattered across the floor among debris and broken equipment. A gynaecologist inside the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher has told UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, about the horror she faced on Sunday when the hospital was attacked. 

“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,” she said.

The RSF has been at war with Sudan’s army for over two years, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and the displacement of around 12 million people. The siege warfare in El-Fasher, which fell to the RSF after 18 months of fighting, has become so extreme that the UN labelled it among the world’s worst humanitarian crises. 

Famine has officially been declared in displacement camps outside of El-Fasher, while people inside the city have turned to animal fodder as a source of food. The UN warned before the city’s fall that 260,000 people remained trapped there without aid, half of them being children. 

This comes after horrific videos released by local activists appeared to show a fighter shooting a group of unarmed civilians sitting on the ground at point-blank range over the weekend. Other unverified footage shared by pro-democracy activists also showed dozens of people lying dead on the ground alongside burnt-out vehicles.

Joint Forces, a military group fighting alongside the army, said on Tuesday (October 28) that the RSF “committed heinous crimes against innocent civilians in the city of El-Fasher”. 

It claimed that more than 2,000 unarmed citizens were “executed and killed” on October 26 and 27, with most of them being “women, children and the elderly”.