Starvation is silently killing 100 people a day in Sudan, according to an aid official who briefed the United Nations Security Council in August, including in the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan state, where hundreds of thousands of people have fled the fighting for control of the country over the past two years. While a few aid flights and convoys have finally been able to start moving, much more is needed to address the famine conditions across Sudan, and the international community must press harder on the warring parties to allow assistance in. That’s especially true of South Kordofan, which tends to get less global attention than the well-known Darfur region.
I traveled to South Kordofan in mid-October and met a nurse who is one of Sudan’s 14 million people forced from their homes by the fighting and now serves as the de facto manager of a temporary camp called al-Hilou outside of the village of Tongouli in the Nuba Mountains. She had been forced to flee hostilities in another part of South Kordofan and with no home and several family members killed, she told me, “All we want is peace.”
Al-Hilou is an informal settlement, really just hand-built stick huts near a river, with no well, no clinic, no one providing assistance like food, water, or medicines. The extremely vulnerable civilians here have fled violence and serious violations of human rights and humanitarian law across Sudan, including killings, rape, and torture at the hands of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Both the SAF and the RSF control pockets of South Kordofan, which lies on Sudan’s border with South Sudan.
Al-Hilou, however, is not under the control of either warring party, but rather under that of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement–North (SPLM-N) an armed group not directly implicated in the current conflict. According to local leaders of the group, about 780,000 people displaced from conflict-affected areas of Sudan now live in more than 15 temporary camps in parts of the Nuba Mountains that they control, an area with an original population of roughly 2.8 million. The group said in August that conditions in its territory constituted a famine, with 20 percent of families experiencing severe food shortages and 30 percent of children suffering from malnutrition. These conditions were triggered by various factors, including the loss of last year’s harvest to a locust invasion and the increased pressures on local communities’ food stocks with the influx of new arrivals since late 2023.
The nurse took me to meet a 21-year-old woman in the camp. As we approached the tent, she was holding up her 8-year-old son by the shoulders because he could not stand on his own, so she could wash his painfully thin legs. He had not eaten anything in days and was unable to speak or walk.
His mother told me that, in January 2024, members of the RSF stormed her home during an attack on the nearby town of Habila and killed her husband, father, and six other relatives and friends. The assailants then raped her, her sister, her mother, and four other women and girls.
I asked if she had visited a nearby clinic in the village to get nutritional supplements for her son. She had, she said, but “they had nothing to give him.” As I spoke with the young mother, the nurse was going swiftly from tent to tent, identifying people with critical cases of malnutrition and trying to secure transport to the clinic and a nearby hospital.
Almost no food assistance is getting into South Kordofan, as Reuters documented in September. Residents said nothing had reached them since three sparse convoys of food aid came in the summer. During our five-day visit, we saw no international organizations or U.N. agencies providing food assistance.
I learned the next morning that the 8-year-old boy had died at 4 a.m. We attended the wake in his mother’s tent, alongside emaciated women and men and children with swollen bellies. The dead boy’s siblings included a 3- year-old brother in a pink t-shirt that hung off his tiny, wasting shoulders.
I realized that in all the days we had visited the camp from morning until sunset, I had not seen or smelled any tea or food being prepared. People in al-Hilou were surviving on individual husks of sorghum they were grinding and drinking with hot water, and cucumbers growing in surrounding fields. The nurse told us this was the fourth child to die of malnutrition in the camp since she had arrived in March. We later visited another camp in the area, where a community leader said five children and 13 older people had died there of malnutrition since June.
During the third quarter of 2024, the largest hospital in the Nuba Mountains, Mother of Mercy in Gidel, registered a 130 percent increase from the previous year in the number of children with acute or moderate malnutrition. A German-run hospital in Kauda treated at least 251 patients for malnutrition between June and October. Seven of them died at the facility. The hospital near al-Hilou camp that is trying to address the growing needs in that area treated at least 483 people for malnutrition between late August and early November, 230 of which were acute cases.
No institution is collecting data on the total number of deaths by starvation, but it’s clear that many more children and adults will die from malnutrition if sufficient food aid does not reach al-Hilou as a matter of urgency.
I ran into the nurse again as we were leaving the camp. She was returning from the hospital, where she had just taken 14 children whom she said were on the brink of death. But the hospital had given its supplies of plumpynut, a peanut-butter-like nutritional supplement used to at least temporarily stave off the most acute cases of malnutrition, to the clinic. (It’s unclear why the 8-year-old didn’t receive that at the clinic.) And the hospital didn’t have food supplies beyond what it needed for inpatients. Some of the children received treatment for other illnesses, but none received either food or the supplement.
When I told the nurse we were leaving the next morning, she lost her composure. We hugged, and only then did I realize that, under her clothing, she was wasting away as well. I asked when she had last eaten. She laughed through her tears, “What would I eat?” Then she quickly turned and disappeared toward a cluster of tents.
The SAF and the RSF must stop willfully obstructing assistance, and all groups controlling territory should urgently facilitate aid access. At the same time, donors should increase their funding to the U.N.’s humanitarian appeal for Sudan, which is only 59 percent funded and $1.1 billion short.
The international community has taken some renewed measures to try to improve the plight of civilians in Sudan, including by sanctioning senior RSF commanders. But the most recent efforts at the U.N. Security Council to force the warring parties to meet their obligations under international law at the Security Council failed.
In the absence of more leadership from Security Council member states and given the scale of the famine killing people across Sudan, the U.N. can speak out much more clearly about the ongoing blockages on aid access that hamper their response, and such appeals should be backed by credible international measures against any party responsible for denying aid to any of Sudan’s population.
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Belkis Wille is an associate director in the Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division at Human Rights Watch.
