BBC investigation finds RSF systematically targeted el-Fasher's hospitals, as UN rights chief warns of possible war crimes

On 8 June 2024, Sudanese paramilitary fighters entered el-Fasher's South Hospital. Staff were caught off guard, and many fled over the back wall. The hospital's director general, a surgeon named Izzeldin Ahmed Dawaud Asow, met a group of fighters outside his office. They did not know he was a doctor, he says, but they shouted ethnic slurs at him. "There are no citizens here. You are Falangi," they told him, using a term that casts non-Arab Sudanese as foreigners. He says he was beaten with rifle butts and blacked out. He survived by playing dead, and heard one fighter say the rubbish had died and should be left.

That raid is one episode in a BBC investigation into what happened to health care in el-Fasher, the Darfur city that fell to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in October 2025, a year before the report was published. Drawing on sources who were in the city, the BBC documented at least 43 separate attacks on hospitals and health sites between May 2024 and October 2025, some struck more than once. For the period from April 2023 to October 2025, its data records 120 medical workers injured, 55 killed and 10 forcibly disappeared or abducted. Attacking health facilities or their staff in wartime is illegal under international law.

UN human rights chief Volker Türk called the findings deeply disturbing and consistent with his office's own analysis. He said the RSF repeatedly struck the city's main hospitals and makeshift facilities, destroying or badly damaging them and cutting off thousands of trapped civilians from care. He said such attacks were serious violations of international humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes. The RSF rejects the findings. Its health minister, Dr Alaa Eldin Nugud, called them propaganda meant to smear the group.

The BBC's chronology begins early in the war, which broke out in April 2023 between the RSF and the army. Some facilities closed within weeks, including the Teaching Hospital in the contested centre of the city, whose work moved to South Hospital. There, services continued despite power cuts and shrinking supplies. When the RSF besieged the city in 2024, South Hospital was shelled several times in late May and early June. Dr Muhamed Suliman, a surgeon there, says the first strike hit a crowded area around the only hospital offering surgery, on a day when staff operated on 16 injured patients. After the 8 June raid, the army and its allies drove the RSF out. Dr Asow returned to find the bodies of several patients and his operating room wrecked. The hospital closed and later fell into RSF hands when the army withdrew.

Dr Nugud insists South Hospital served as a military base. He says missile launchers stood on the grounds and showed the BBC a video of weapon remains filmed more than a year after it closed, plus what he called maps of landmines around the Teaching Hospital, which sits beside army headquarters. Under international law, hospitals can lose protection if used for acts harmful to the enemy. Doctors told the BBC the hospital was not part of the base and that they only visited to collect equipment. The BBC found no independent evidence for Dr Nugud's claims, and the Darfur regional government rejected them.

Staff then moved to the Saudi Maternity Hospital in the west, near the army's main bases, and attacks on it intensified within days. Médecins Sans Frontières said it did not know whether hospitals were intentionally targeted but that the belligerents were taking no precautions to spare them. Six doctors told the BBC they saw systematic targeting, with Saudi Hospital hit on some days up to 25 times by shelling and precision-guided drones. Smaller sites suffered too. Private hospitals and neighbourhood clinics closed one by one. The Specialised Children's Hospital moved twice and was shelled and closed both times, and the main dialysis centre was struck, then hit again after relocating. Doctors believe fighters targeted the sites because army or allied fighters were among the patients.

Staff improvised. They piled sandbags, built underground bunkers from steel containers and set up alternative surgical sites. Dr Asow says the makeshift surgery was attacked five times in 2025. He describes a drone following people carrying the wounded, striking at the gate on 15 March 2025 and killing nine. On 17 August, he says, a drone hit a donkey cart ferrying patients after the ambulances were destroyed, killing two patients, the driver and the donkey. By October 2025 Saudi Hospital was the last working facility. On 25 October the RSF stormed it amid reports of a massacre that killed more than 460 patients and companions. The RSF denies it, though the WHO condemned the reported killings and satellite images appeared to show clusters of bodies on the grounds.

The RSF-backed government now runs health care in the city and has released videos of the Saudi and Teaching hospitals reopened. Dr Nugud denies doctors were abducted, saying they chose to stay. One doctor in his video, Dr Al-Haj Mohamed Ahmed, told the BBC he was forced to work there and feared being shot. He and Dr Mustafa Ahmed were captured while trying to flee and sent back. They brought a cholera outbreak in a makeshift prison under control, and Dr Mustafa Ahmed recalls waking several mornings to find 50 inmates dead. Both sides in the war have been accused of striking health facilities, and the WHO condemned a March 2026 bombing of al-Daein hospital in RSF-held territory, widely attributed to the army, which denies it. The front lines have moved on, and attacks on health care continue.