El-Obeid is fast becoming the latest flashpoint in Sudan’s war, with the UN Human Rights Council ordering an “urgent inquiry” into alleged violations and abuses in and around the besieged city as it warned of a looming risk of “large-scale atrocities”.
The council’s alarm came today as new information underscored the toll on the youngest victims: at least 330 Sudanese children have been killed or injured in the first six months of 2026, many of them in drone strikes.
Children “are being killed and injured in their homes, on the roads, in markets, and while attempting to access essential services such as education and healthcare”, UNICEF’s Sudan chief Sheldon Yett said.
For weeks, the North Kordofan town of El-Obeid has been battered by paramilitary drones, with strikes hitting civilian infrastructure — including power stations, water systems and schools — in attacks that have disrupted daily life and essential services.
The rights council said it fears El-Obeid could suffer a reprise of atrocities committed during the RSF’s October 2025 assault on the city of El-Fasher — violence a UN inquiry found bore “the hallmarks of genocide”.
A Sudanese girl in al-Rahmaniyah camp for displaced people, near the city of El-Obeid in the Kordofan region
“Any further deterioration could expose even more children to death, injury, displacement and other grave protection risks,” UNICEF said today.
A strategic hub in the Kordofan region, El-Obeid has been encircled for months by the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group that has been fighting Sudan’s army since April 2023.
‘Another human rights catastrophe is unfolding’
In a resolution adopted by consensus, the 47-member UN Human Rights Council voiced “deep concern about the imminent risk of large-scale atrocities by the (RSF)… faced by hundreds of thousands of civilians, including children and internally displaced persons in and around El-Obeid”.
The measure, passed after the council held an urgent debate on Friday, also condemned “reports of dozens of drone strikes on El-Obeid in the last two weeks, including on hospitals and health facilities”.
It further denounced the “widespread use of rape and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence”, and raised “alarm at reports of the use of starvation as a method of warfare” — language reflecting mounting concern over tactics that can devastate communities long after the fighting moves on.
Introducing the resolution on behalf of a number of countries, Britain’s human rights ambassador in Geneva Eleanor Sanders told the council it was “not enough to express shock and concern”.
“We must take concrete action to support accountability for these crimes.”
El-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state, sits on a key route linking RSF-held areas in the western Darfur region to army-controlled regions in the east, a geography that has long made it a prized prize in Sudan’s shifting battle lines.
Home to about half a million people and hosting nearly 100,000 refugees displaced by the civil war, El-Obeid has come under its fiercest RSF attacks yet in recent weeks.
During Friday’s debate, UN rights chief Volker Turk told the council that “the signs from El-Obeid are clear and unmistakable: another human rights catastrophe is unfolding in Sudan”.
Monday’s text instructed the existing fact-finding mission to carry out “an urgent inquiry into any violations and abuses of international… law and related to international crimes, allegedly committed in and around El-Obeid”.
The investigators were asked to deliver updates to the rights council and the General Assembly in New York during their next sessions, both in September.
‘External interference’
Beyond El-Obeid, the resolution pressed for “an immediate and complete ceasefire by all parties” in Sudan’s war.
It also condemned “all forms of external interference that fuel the conflict, including the supply of arms and military material”.
But the text stopped short of naming specific countries — a silence Sudan’s ambassador Hassan Hamid Hassan told the council he regretted.
The resolution, he said, “opted for relatively vague language without naming the state that has violated Security Council resolution… 1591”, adopted in 2005 to expand an arms embargo on non-government entities in Sudan’s embattled Darfur region.
“I’m speaking about the United Arab Emirates of course,” he said.
Khartoum has repeatedly accused Abu Dhabi of supplying arms to the RSF.
UAE denies the allegations, despite a number of international reports pointing to its involvement.
Dozens of NGOs that urged the council last month to name names and directly call out the UAE also voiced disappointment that the resolution did not do so.
“Evidence points to sustained UAE support to the RSF, despite knowing that such support is used to commit egregious crimes against civilians, but other actors should also be held to account,” Nicolas Agostini of DefendDefenders said in a statement.
The humanitarian stakes extend far beyond one city. Across Sudan, five million children are internally displaced, according to UN figures, while millions are going hungry — including more than 825,000 children under five suffering severe acute malnutrition.
