A BBC investigation has documented at least 43 separate attacks on hospitals and health facilities in el-Fasher, Sudan, between May 2024 and October 2025, providing the most detailed public chronology yet of how the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) dismantled the Darfur city's healthcare system during its long siege.
Using testimony from medical staff who were on the ground, the broadcaster found that 120 health workers were injured, 55 killed and 10 forcibly disappeared or abducted in el-Fasher between April 2023 and October 2025. Some facilities were struck more than once.
'It was deliberate'
Dr Muhamed Suliman, a surgeon based in el-Fasher during the siege, told the BBC the RSF was "trying to evacuate the hospitals, to put them out of service because the health system is the cornerstone of any city or any state." He described one of the first strikes on the city's South Hospital, which had absorbed services after the main Teaching Hospital closed early in the war: "It was intense. It was deliberate. It was planned."
The World Health Organization said events in el-Fasher represented "one of the clearest and most severe examples" of the war's impact on healthcare in Sudan. UN human rights chief Volker Türk called the findings "deeply disturbing," saying the attacks on civilian infrastructure may amount to war crimes under international humanitarian law, which bars strikes on hospitals and medical staff during conflict.
The health minister of the RSF's civilian-affiliated administration, Dr Alaa Eldin Nugud, dismissed the findings as propaganda, calling them a deliberate attempt by Sudan's army and its allies to smear the paramilitary group's reputation. Both sides in the civil war, which erupted in April 2023, have faced accusations of striking medical sites; in March this year the WHO condemned a bombing of al-Daein hospital in RSF-held eastern Darfur that Sudan's military is believed to have carried out, a charge it denies.
Echoes of genocide warnings
UN investigators have said the fighting in el-Fasher bore "the hallmarks of genocide," with Arab militias that now form the RSF's backbone accused of targeting non-Arab ethnic groups native to the city. The healthcare findings add a new, granular layer to that record, documenting not just violence against civilians but the systematic removal of the infrastructure needed to treat them. The investigation comes a year after el-Fasher fell to the RSF, a milestone rights groups have called one of the war's most brutal chapters.
