Drone strikes on civilian infrastructure across Sudan have intensified over the past two weeks to the point where the United Nations’ resident and humanitarian coordinator, Denise Brown, is publicly asking member states to intervene. Speaking to UN News, Brown described what appear to be targeted attacks on energy and fuel sources, protected under international humanitarian law, and said the pattern is systematically destroying the inputs that hospitals, water systems and aid logistics run on.
The operational detail is specific. World Health Organization colleagues were at a hospital just outside Khartoum when a strike cut its electricity; the hospital has no generator and no solar panels, and dialysis treatment for 25 people stopped outright. Hundreds of aid trucks are stranded by fuel shortages. The World Food Programme, which moves thousands of trucks across the country, has had seven of its convoys hit this year and 20 over the past two years.
Brown was explicit that the UN does not know where the current strikes originate, and this story attributes no strike to either the Sudanese Armed Forces or the Rapid Support Forces on the UN’s account. Separately, medics and rights groups reported through Al Jazeera that drone attacks in western regions killed more than 160 people in recent days and that three children were killed in Khartoum on Monday; those tolls are reported figures from those groups, not UN verified counts. A UN spokesperson said on Monday that the secretary general was alarmed by continued deadly strikes killing civilians, including children, and disrupting central services.
The UN puts the displaced population at about 13 million people. Brown’s appeal was for funding and for political pressure to stop the strikes, framed in her own words as being about people rather than politics. The United States last week urged the Security Council to push for a humanitarian truce and a wider arms embargo, which China and Russia opposed.
Status: the warning is issued and the strikes are continuing. The confirming document to watch is any Security Council product on a truce or embargo, and WFP convoy reporting for whether aid movement recovers.