Category: News & Stories

Starvation as a policy 

The siege has triggered a famine: restrictions on food, clean water, medicine, and aid deliveries are causing acute malnutrition rates to skyrocket. Civilians desperate for aid at distribution points face deadly force — for months, MSF clinics responded to mass casualties resulting from Israeli fire at the food distribution sites managed by the GHF. 

A Day of Crisis: Al-Nao Treats Hundreds of Patients

“27 July 2023, the team working in the emergency room treated more than 150 wounded patients,” says Dr Khalid Abd Rahman Abdelsalam, who was MSF’s project coordinator in Omdurman at the time. “Al-Nao hospital didn’t even blink. Like a beehive, every department, from the emergency room to the blood bank, moved in perfect harmony.”

“The emergency team was composed and highly professional, managing to absorb the overwhelming influx of patients, as if they had rehearsed for this very moment,” he says.

It was a day like many others for staff at Al-Nao. The shelling and bombing were persistent; so much so that people learned to recognise different projectiles based on their sound. The frontline in Omdurman, located in the Khartoum metropolitan area, where heavy fighting became a daily reality, was a mere two kilometres from the doorsteps of Al-Nao hospital. Outside, the city roared with chaos, but inside, the hospital moved with purpose.

MSF Support for Al-Nao Hospital: From Emergency to Partnership

From 2023 to 2025, MSF’s support to Al-Nao hospital evolved from emergency rehabilitation to a comprehensive partnership with the gradual return of a full MSF project team. Today, we provide clinical training, essential medical supplies, fuel, water and sanitation services, and food for patients. We have also trained Ministry of Health staff on mass casualty response, and MSF provided financial incentives so they could continue to carry out critical, life-saving work in their community.

As the circumstances surrounding the hospital changed, so did the hospital’s role. Al-Nao’s service area expanded beyond Omdurman as frontlines shifted, to include parts of Bahri, and other districts of Khartoum state. With other hospitals damaged, destroyed or not yet functioning, Al-Nao became the only functioning emergency facility in Omdurman. Since July 2023, more than 48,000 trauma patients have been treated in the emergency room of Al-Nao hospital.

A Hospital on the Frontline of Sudan’s War

On 1 February 2025, an explosion struck a market in Omdurman. Within minutes, Al-Nao’s emergency room was overwhelmed.

“I can see the lives of men, women and children torn apart,” said Christopher Lockyear, MSF’s Secretary General, who happened to be at the hospital on that day. “There are dozens and dozens of people with devastating injuries. The morgue is full of dead bodies. What I see in front of me is a scene of utter carnage.”

The hospital teams treated 158 injured patients that day. Just three days later, another shell struck within 100 metres of the hospital, killing six people, including a local volunteer who had been providing meals through an initiative at the hospital. Al-Nao has been hit three times since the war began; in August 2023, October 2023 and June 2024. Yet, the staff kept going, no matter what.

“These actions are entrenched in the broader settler-colonial process, where the risk of ethnic cleansing — through the forced removal of Palestinian communities — will cement permanent demographic change,” says Onidi.

Tactics of displacement are expanding and intensifying

The recently approved E1 settlement plan would completely bisect the West Bank, block off the north from the south, and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.¹ This is one of the clearest recent attempts by the Israeli authorities to kill any prospect of a Palestinian future.

Militarised operations have displaced tens of thousands

Since the beginning of the year, the ongoing Israeli Iron Wall military operation has forcibly displaced 40,000 people in the northern West Bank, according to UNRWA. Three refugee camps have been violently raided and emptied. Homes and civilian infrastructure — including schools and healthcare centres —have been demolished, increasing the likelihood that the displacement will become permanent.

When the military operation began, MSF sent mobile medical teams across 42 sites in Tulkarem and Jenin, including to Ministry of Health clinics, and delivered key relief items to displaced Palestinians.

Israeli forces destroy Palestinian homes

Since January 2023, a further 6,450 Palestinians have been displaced in the north of the West Bank due to home demolitions. In April and May 2025 alone, MSF provided material and mental health support to residents in 12 locations in the Hebron governorate whose homes were demolished. Two hundred forty-six people, including at least 97 children, were forcibly displaced.

This represents only a fraction of the number of demolitions that have been carried out in the West Bank in the same period.

“This is not the first demolition or army incursion that has happened in the village, but this time was the most aggressive,” says Warda*, a community member in Hebron. “We asked them if we could retrieve our belongings and take some things out of the houses before they demolished them, but they refused. They took our things out of our home, they drove over them with the bulldozer and destroyed them.”