Sharjah 24 – AFP: Two days of attacks by Sudanese paramilitaries on the Darfur city of El-Fasher killed 48 people, a medical source told AFP on Friday, after world leaders appealed for an end to the country's suffering.
Artillery fire from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killed 30 people and wounded dozens on Friday alone, a medical source at El-Fasher Teaching Hospital told AFP, as the paramilitaries and regular army vie for control of the North Darfur state capital.
The shelling comes a day after an assault on a market brought "18 dead to the hospital" on Thursday, "some of them burned and others killed by shrapnel", the source said, requesting anonymity for their own protection in light of repeated attacks on health workers and hospitals.
The plight of Sudan, and El-Fasher in particular, has been under discussion this week at the UN General Assembly in New York after 17 months of devastating fighting between the RSF and the regular army.
"We must compel the warring parties to accept humanitarian pauses in El-Fasher, Khartoum and other highly vulnerable areas," the US ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, said on Wednesday.
The Teaching Hospital is one of the last still receiving patients in El-Fasher, where reports of a "full-scale assault" by RSF last weekend led UN chief Antonio Guterres to call for an urgent ceasefire.
The paramilitaries have besieged El-Fasher since May, and famine has already been declared in Zamzam refugee camp near the city of two million.
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