Doctors Without Borders: The displaced people of El Fasher are hungry and homeless, and the humanitarian response is insufficient | news

Médecins Sans Frontières’ emergency response coordinator, Meriam Laaroussi, warned of the deteriorating humanitarian situation for displaced people fleeing the city of El Fasher, the capital of the northern state. Darfur Sudanese, noting that what they are facing there is “a disaster by all standards.”

She confirmed to Arousi – in an interview with Al Jazeera – that most of the displaced “arrive in Tawila after days of walking, exhausted, with nothing but the clothes they are wearing,” adding that the displaced are in dire need of shelter, clothing, and urgent food and medical aid.

She said that women and children constitute the largest percentage of the displaced, and that all children under five years old suffer from acute malnutrition, while many of them need urgent surgeries as a result of their exposure to violence during displacement or after their arrival in Tawila.

Sudanese medical sources reported to Al Jazeera on Thursday that the influx of displaced people fleeing from the city of El Fasher to the town of Tawila, west of the city in North Darfur state, continued for the fourth day in a row.

The Sudan Doctors Network had previously reported that more than 15,000 displaced people arrived in Tawila from El Fasher within two days.

The Without Borders coordinator added that the hospital supported by the organization “is working around the clock to perform emergency surgeries that save the lives of those fleeing El Fasher,” stressing that the humanitarian response capacity is still weak and insufficient.

She pointed out that the lack of food aid and lack of sanitation increases the suffering of the displaced, explaining that food distribution has almost stopped due to the difficulty of supplies reaching the region.

Laaroussi concluded by saying, “The humanitarian situation in Tawila is catastrophic, and the current humanitarian support does not rise to the level of the crisis and does not meet the needs of people who have lost everything.”

According to United Nations estimates, about 36,000 civilians have fled El Fasher since last Sunday due to the battles that broke out between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese army, and many of them headed to the city of Tawila, which originally housed about 650,000 displaced people.

Three days ago, the head of the Sudanese Sovereignty Council, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, said that the assessment of the leadership in El Fasher was to leave the city due to the systematic destruction it had been subjected to, a day after the Rapid Support Forces announced their control of El Fasher, after a siege that lasted more than a year.