ISTANBUL

At least 1,700 children are suffering from severe malnutrition in Tawila displacement camp in North Darfur, one of Sudan’s largest sites for internally displaced people amid fighting between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a local organization warned Friday.

Two-thirds of Sudan’s population now needs urgent humanitarian assistance, whether inside displacement camps or within host communities in rural areas, villages and nomadic regions, the General Coordination for Displaced Persons and Refugees said in a statement.

Tawila camp, it said, has received more than 1 million displaced people since the war between the army and the RSF erupted on April 15, 2023.

The recent violence in El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, alone pushed “hundreds of thousands” of newly displaced people into the camp in catastrophic conditions marked by hunger, injuries and extreme hardship, the group said.

The latest field data showed that 1,600 people have faced gender-based violence, 3,100 have been wounded by gunfire, 1,700 children are suffering from acute malnutrition, 3,600 elderly people are experiencing severe malnutrition, and more than 7 million people are now internally displaced across Darfur.

The group warned that conditions in Tawila and across Darfur “are rapidly deteriorating” as displacement surges and camp needs escalate.

The Sudan Doctors Network said Friday that its field teams documented the deaths of 23 children from acute malnutrition in the cities of Dilling and Kadugli in South Kordofan over the past month, blaming the fatalities on an RSF blockade that has cut off food, medicine, and basic supplies to the region.

Earlier this month, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said that famine has been confirmed in the war-scarred city of El-Fasher in Sudan’s North Darfur state and the besieged town of Kadugli in South Kordofan.

On Oct. 26, the RSF militia seized control of El-Fasher and committed massacres of civilians, according to local and international organizations, amid warnings that the assault could entrench the country’s geographical partition.

Since April 2023, the Sudanese army and the RSF have been locked in a war that regional and international mediations have failed to end. The conflict has killed thousands of people and displaced millions of others.