Actualité

𝐒𝐮𝐝𝐚𝐧: 𝐔𝐍 𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐩𝐭𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐞 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐩𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐃𝐚𝐫𝐟𝐮𝐫 𝐭𝐨𝐰𝐧

United Nations, United States
Saturday, July 05, 2025

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced on Friday June 27 that he was working to set up a one-week humanitarian pause in the besieged capital of North Darfur, where the population is “dying of hunger”, a proposal accepted by only one of the parties to the conflict.
Since April 2023, a deadly war has been waging between the army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, the country’s de facto leader since the 2021 coup, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by his former deputy, General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo.
Since May 2024, the RSF, which controls almost the entire Darfur region, has laid siege to the North Darfur state capital, El-Facher, and launched repeated attacks to seize the city of around one million inhabitants.
According to a medical source, the latest attack on Friday left 13 people dead, including three children, and 21 wounded in RSF bombardments.
“The situation in El-Facher is dramatic,” commented Antonio Guterres, who in a telephone conversation with General Burhane proposed a one-week pause to allow humanitarian aid access.

A woman sits next to her child suffering from cholera at an isolation unit outside the Bashayer Hospital, south of Khartoum on May 31, 2025. In Khartoum, where a cholera outbreak has killed dozens this week, doctors struggled to treat patients with dwindling supplies as the disease rapidly spread. In other overwhelmed hospitals across the war-ravaged capital, medics have been forced to lay patients on floors in hallways and courtyards. (Photo by AFP)

The wreckage of cars lie on the remains of the Shambat Bridge, which connects Omdurman and Bahri, on June 24, 2025 in the Sudanese capital region. Clashes between Sudan’s regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, at war since April 2023, have intensified in the country’s west and south in recent weeks. (Photo by AFP)

“The population is starving in an extremely difficult situation, so we need some time for a truce to distribute aid, and this must be agreed several days in advance to prepare for the massive influx of aid to El-Facher,” he said.
“We are making contact with both parties with this in mind”, he noted. “I have a positive response from General Burhane, and I am hopeful that both sides will understand how vital it is to avoid the catastrophe we are seeing in El-Facher”, he added.
– “Concrete actions” –
The Sovereignty Council chaired by General Burhane said earlier on Friday that it had accepted the proposed week-long truce.
But an RSF source said he had received no such proposal.
At a Security Council meeting on Sudan, UN Under-Secretary-General for Africa Martha Pobee hinted that the concept of a humanitarian pause could be extended to other locations.
The commitment made by the parties in May 2023 to protect civilians “must be translated into concrete action”, she declared.
Within this framework, “we hope for a predictable and time-limited humanitarian pause to facilitate humanitarian movements to and from conflict-affected areas, starting with El-Facher, and to allow civilians to leave voluntarily and safely”, she said.

A Sudanese army soldier waves as he walks past a war-damaged building in Salha, south of Omdurman, two days after the Sudanese army recaptured it from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), on May 22, 2025. The Sudanese army said on May 20 that it had dislodged rival paramilitaries from their last positions in Omdurman, part of the Sudanese capital, securing all of Khartoum state nearly two months after recapturing the capital’s centre. (Photo by Ebrahim Hamid / AFP)

This attempt to silence the guns in El-Facher, at least temporarily, comes after a UN convoy carrying food destined for El-Facher was hit by an air strike in early June, killing five people.
In Sudan, famine has been declared in five areas, including three IDP camps near El-Facher. The UN has been unable to officially declare famine in El-Facher due to a lack of reliable data, but this does not mean that people there are not already dying of malnutrition.

Humaniterre with AFP