Attacks on kindergarten and hospital kill 114 in Sudan, WHO says

By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE and DECLAN WALSH

Repeated strikes on a kindergarten and hospital in Sudan killed 114 people, including 63 children, and targeted the responders who were trying to get the wounded to safety, the World Health Organization said earlier this week.

The attack was the kind of mass atrocity that has marked Sudan’s 2 1/2-year civil war, in which civilians and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, have faced relentless attack. The massacre also shows the movement of the front line from the western Darfur region into the central Kordofan region.

Initial accounts said missiles fired from drones were used in the attack on multiple targets in the town of Kalogi in South Kordofan state last Thursday. Most of the children killed reportedly died in a strike on the kindergarten, and the hospital was hit at least three times, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, said in a statement posted Monday on the social media platform X.

“Disturbingly, paramedics and responders came under attack as they tried to move the injured from the kindergarten to the hospital,” he said.

In addition to the dead, 35 people were injured, many of them parents and others who had rushed to help the victims.

Sudan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a medical organization, Sudan Doctors Network, said the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces carried out the attacks, which the doctors condemned as a war crime.

Earlier atrocities attributed to the RSF include the massacre of thousands of civilians as they overran the city of el-Fasher last month. Witnesses said the fighters shot hundreds of patients and civilians as they sheltered in the city’s maternity hospital.

Since the capture of el-Fasher, the last stronghold of the army in Darfur, RSF forces have advanced into central and southern Kordofan region, which provides a buffer between the army’s main base in eastern states, including the capital, Khartoum.