Paramilitary shelling kills over 30 in besieged Sudan city

Paramilitary shelling of Sudan's besieged city of El-Fashir, in the western region of Darfur, has killed more than 30 civilians and wounded dozens more, activists said on Monday.

The attack, which took place on Sunday, involved "heavy artillery shelling" and targeted the city's residential neighbourhoods, said the local resistance committee, one of hundreds of volunteer groups coordinating aid across Sudan.

Since April 2023, the war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has killed tens of thousands, uprooted 13 million and created what the UN describes as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

El-Fashir, the state capital of North Darfur, remains the last major city in the vast Darfur region that the paramilitary group has not conquered.

Last week, the RSF launched a renewed offensive on the city and two nearby displacement camps, Zamzam and Abu Shouk, killing more than 400 people and displacing some 400,000, according to the United Nations.

In a bloody ground offensive, the RSF took control of Zamzam camp, where aid workers say up to one million people were sheltering.

Most of the displaced fled just north, to El-Fashir city itself, or 60 kilometres (37 miles) west to the small town of Tawila, according to the UN.

By Thursday, more than 150,000 people had arrived in El-Fashir, while another 180,000 had fled to Tawila, the UN's migration agency has said.

Humanitarian aid is nearly nonexistent in both famine-threatened towns.

On Monday, the UN's humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, described the situation in the region as "horrifying".

He said he had spoken by phone with both army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his rival paramilitary commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who committed to giving "full access to get aid in".

Throughout the war, both the army and the RSF have been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war against civilians.