Behind the headline numbers of Sudan’s war lies a quieter tragedy, the loss of the places where the wounded go to survive. A BBC investigation into Sudan RSF hospital attacks says the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces systematically destroyed healthcare in El-Fasher during their siege and takeover of the Darfur city a year ago. The RSF rejects the findings.
What the BBC found
Drawing on sources inside El-Fasher, the BBC documented at least 43 separate attacks on hospitals and health sites between May 2024 and October 2025, with some hit more than once. Across the wider period from April 2023 to October 2025, its data records 120 people injured, 55 killed and ten abducted or forcibly disappeared. Private hospitals and neighbourhood clinics closed one by one, and relocated facilities were hit too. When the RSF seized the city, the Saudi Hospital was the only health facility still working.
Doctors told the BBC they believe fighters targeted medical sites because army or allied fighters were among the patients. One surgeon said the aim was to put hospitals out of service, since a health system holds a city together.
The RSF’s response and the legal question
The RSF’s health minister, a surgeon himself, dismissed the accounts as propaganda and said South Hospital served as a military base. The BBC said it found no independent evidence for that claim. Under international law, hospitals can lose protection if a party uses them for acts harmful to the enemy, but the bar is high.
UN human rights chief Volker Türk called the findings deeply disturbing and consistent with his office’s own analysis, and said the attacks may amount to war crimes. The World Health Organization described El-Fasher as one of the clearest and most severe examples of the war’s toll on health care.
Sudan’s wider humanitarian crisis
This is not a one-sided story. The army is widely believed to be behind a March 2026 drone strike on al-Daein hospital in RSF-held East Darfur, which killed dozens, though it denies this. The pattern is clear: across Sudan, civilians pay when hospitals become targets.
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