At least 27 people were killed and 130 others were injured in the last twenty-four hours in hostilities between the Sudanese armed forces and paramilitaries in the town of El Fasher, in the vast region of Darfur (west), more than a year after the outbreak of the war in Sudan, the UN announced yesterday. Sunday.

Clashes, which began on Friday, continued yesterday, with aircraft shelling the eastern and northern parts of the city and the warring parties exchanging artillery fire, residents told AFP by telephone.

On Friday alone, fighting between the army and Rapid Support Force (RSF) paramilitaries in El Fasser left “27 dead” and “130 wounded” while forcibly displacing “hundreds” of people, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) summarized ).

According to an announcement by the non-governmental organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières, MSF), two children and a member of the health staff were killed inside an intensive care unit at the Babiker Nahar pediatric hospital due to an aerial bombardment by the armed forces fifty meters from the building.

The roof of the ICU collapsed, killing “two children who were being treated” in it, the NGO explained.

In recent weeks, the international community has been warning against the looming massacre in the capital of North Darfur state, the only one of Darfur’s five states that has not yet fallen to the IDF.

On Saturday night into Sunday, Clementine Nqueta-Salami, OCHA’s coordinator for Sudan, spoke of shelling with “heavy weapons” in El Fasher, home to 1.5 million people, including 800,000 internally displaced.

On Friday, a medical source at the city’s only hospital remaining in operation told AFP that “the morgue is suffocatingly full of bodies.”

Amid fighting, “the hospital does not have an ambulance to transport the wounded,” OCHA said yesterday.

In Sudan, a war has been raging since April 15 between the armed forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitaries led by the junta’s second-in-command turned enemy, General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the armed conflict. In El Jeneina alone, the capital of West Darfur, 10,000 to 15,000 human lives were lost, according to the UN.

The residents of El Fasher, about 400 kilometers east of Jenaina, fear that they will experience a similar scenario.

The city remained until recently relatively unscathed by the war, thanks to an agreement reached between local armed groups and the DTY. But last month, the two main local armed groups renounced their neutrality and started fighting on the side of the armed forces. In retaliation, the DTY surrounded the city.

Both the armed forces and the paramilitaries are accused of indiscriminately bombing areas where civilians live and obstructing the distribution of humanitarian aid. Paramilitaries are specifically accused of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.