Aid organisation: hundreds of children in Sudan are starving to death

Save the Children claims that due to warehouse raids that have occurred since a civil war began, food supplies are “critically” low.

According to Save the Children, conflict between state forces and opposing paramilitary soldiers has resulted in food shortages that have led to the starvation deaths of at least 498 children in Sudan, including 20 infants at a public orphanage.

Arif Noor, Save the Children’s country director in Sudan, said in a statement on Tuesday that “never did we think we would see children dying from hunger in such numbers, but this is now the reality in Sudan.”

According to the organisation, 57 of its nutrition centres have closed since the violence in Khartoum began in the middle of April, leaving 31,000 children without access to care for malnutrition and related disorders nationwide.

The agency reports that because therapeutic food supplies are “critically low,” emergency reserves are only used in the “most extreme cases,” leaving staff in the remaining 108 operating facilities with “few options on how to treat” seriously ill youngsters.

According to government statistics, there have been almost 4,000 fatalities since clashes between the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) began on April 15. Earlier this month, the UN office for migration said that approximately 3.9 million people had been displaced both inside and outside the African nation.

A collaborative operation between the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) saw the evacuation of hundreds of children and adults from the Mygoma Orphanage in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, to a “safer location.”

The action was taken as a result of reports from nearby doctors and a volunteer group that supports the state-run facility that the children were dying from severe dehydration and starvation.

At the time, UNICEF estimated that more than 13.6 million children in Sudan were still at risk and in utter need of life-saving assistance.

According to Save the Children, at least 50 children in a state orphanage in Khartoum perished from malnutrition on Tuesday ‘after fighting prevented personnel from accessing the premises to care for them’.

In the eastern Gedaref province, at least 132 child deaths from starvation were reported, while at least 316 kids, largely under the age of five, passed away in the southern White Nile area, it continued.

The availability of therapeutic nutritional items has been severely restricted throughout the nation, according to Noor, as a result of the looting of UN warehouses, the burning of the therapeutic food factory, and the lack of finance.