A looming paramilitary assault on the Sudanese city of El Obeid threatens to deepen the country’s “already catastrophic hunger crisis”, the World Food Programme has warned.

The UN agency said reports of “substantial military activity” around the city, coupled with escalating drone attacks, risk unleashing “a new wave of violence and mass displacement” in El Obeid, the strategic capital of North Kordofan state in central Sudan, which has become the new epicentre in the country’s four year war.

An estimated 62 per cent of Sudan’s population, around 29 million people, are already acutely ​food insecure, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the global hunger monitor, which has also confirmed famine in two areas.

The WFP is already providing aid to over 100,000 people in El Obeid, where hundreds of thousands of people are enduring siege conditions and diminishing access to food, water, healthcare as escalating drone strikes target basic services.

The UN agency is now rapidly pre-positioning aid to support up to 250,000 people who may be forced to flee if the situation deteriorates further.

Abdallah Alwardat, WFP’s Country Director for Sudan, said: “We must act swiftly to save lives as per our humanitarian mandate…This action, however, comes at a cost”.

He warned that the agency was diverting food stocks originally intended to be pre-positioned ahead of the rainy season, adding: “In September, we will run out of food for our emergency operations across the country, which today reaches just one in five people in need of food assistance for survival”.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are attempting to seize El Obeid, which hosts a major air base and an infantry division and sits on a major road linking Sudan’s Darfur region to Khartoum.

If captured, it would give the paramilitary group control of a key corridor towards the capital and a fresh operating base for attacks across central Sudan.

El Obeid is also a critical humanitarian hub for the wider Kordofan region, now a key frontline in Sudan’s war between the army and the RSF, which erupted after two formerly allied generals turned on each other in April 2023.

Now in its fourth year, the conflict has been marked by massacre, mass displacement, famine and attacks on healthcare, and has been described by the UN as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”.

International concern has now intensified around El Obeid, with the UK and six other European powers calling for an immediate halt to violence earlier this week.

Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, warned the city was on the “precipice of atrocity”, with the RSF using drones to target civilian infrastructure, attacking supply routes and cutting off access to basic services.

She wrote on X: “I am deeply alarmed by the immediate and escalating risk of new atrocities in Sudan.

“We have pushed the UN Security Council to agree unanimously that the RSF assault on El Obeid must stop, that civilians must be protected, and that there will be no impunity for the perpetrators of war crime”. 

However, earlier this week, Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health, told Parliament that Britain had previously  failed to act for fear of upsetting the United Arab Emirates, which backs the RSF.

The leading war crimes investigator said Britain had been uniquely placed to prevent the slaughter of an estimated 60,000 people in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, in October last year, but did not intervene forcefully enough.

UN investigators later concluded that the RSF’s ethnic purge bore “the hallmarks of genocide”.

As the UN security council “penholder” on Sudan – meaning it leads on drafting resolutions and co-ordinating the council’s response to the conflict – Britain was, Mr Raymond said, still  the world’s “best hope” of preventing atrocities.

This week, Mr Raymond said that in El Obeid rainfall and disease could ultimately pose a greater threat to civilians than direct fighting.

He warned that flooding in low-lying areas where displaced people are sheltering could contaminate water supplies and trigger large-scale outbreaks of waterborne disease.

“We could have dysentery, cholera, and malaria affecting people who are already weakened, and that can kill more people than bombs or bullets,” he said.

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