At least 20 civilians have been killed during shelling and fighting in Darfur and El Ubaid in the neighboring state of North Kordofan, lawyers’ and doctors’ unions in war-torn Sudan said on Saturday.

“During rocket exchanges between the army and the Rapid Support Force (RSF), 16 civilians were killed on Friday in Nyala”, the capital of South Darfur state, a doctors’ union said, citing a “first count” that was “provisional”.

Besides, at least one civilian was killed by a sniper, according to the same source.

In El Ubaid, 350 kilometers south of Khartoum, four more civilians were killed and 45 wounded when mortar shells hit a hospital and the area around it, the union said.

He explained that fighting had been raging since the day before yesterday morning and a shell fell in the courtyard of a university hospital while other shells hit the perimeter of three other health structures.

The war between the armed forces of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the DTY paramilitaries of General Mohamed Hamdan Daghlo, which broke out on April 15, has claimed the lives of at least 3,300 people, according to the most recent estimate by the non-governmental organization ACLED, which is undoubtedly greatly underestimated.

Fighting has spread to West Darfur and South Darfur.

Theater of an extremely bloody civil war in the 2000s, Darfur is a DTY stronghold. Hostilities have long centered on El Jenaina, the capital of West Darfur state, where the UN suspects “crimes against humanity” have been committed.

The fighting has never stopped in the capital Khartoum and continues to expand: yesterday Saturday, for the first time, residents spoke of air force shelling of villages in the northern part of Al Jazeera state.

The vast, fertile state south of Khartoum is home to much of the 3.3 million internally displaced and war refugees.

If the conflict continues there, the displaced will be forced to flee again, NGOs predict, and humanitarian organizations that have just begun to help them will also be forced to shift their – meager compared to needs – resources elsewhere, which means applications for permits from the authorities, which are generally delayed.

Experts believe that both parties intend to expand the battlefields. “The DTY has had an advantage in Khartoum since the first days and has not stopped strengthening,” notes the International Crisis Group think tank.

The army launched a large-scale offensive on July 15, especially in the industrial area of ​​northern Khartoum, but the operation turned out to be a “spectacular failure”, according to the same source.

For their part, the DTY is trying to secure their supply routes with men, weapons and ammunition by strengthening their control over Darfur’s road links to Khartoum.

Delegations of the warring parties are still in Saudi Arabia for the hypothetical resumption of negotiations to declare a ceasefire.

Last night Friday, however, Khartoum denied “any information” that the parties are “close” to an agreement on a truce.