CNN
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An important border crossing for humanitarian aid into Sudan will be reopened, the Sudanese government announced on Thursday. The war is escalating and more and more people in the country need food, water, shelter and medical care.
The Sudanese Sovereignty Council announced it would reopen the Adre border crossing with Chad for three months. It was closed in February by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), which claimed the crossing was being used to transport weapons.
The reopening of the key border crossing follows growing calls for more humanitarian assistance in Sudan’s Darfur region, where civil war between the SAF and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) continues to ravage the country. Sudan is at a “breaking point”, a UN agency said earlier this week.
At a UN Security Council meeting on August 6, the United States accused the SAF of “denying humanitarian access to supplies through the critical Adre border crossing.” Similarly, the United Kingdom said the force was “impeding aid deliveries to Darfur, including by closing the Adre border crossing, the most direct route for delivering aid on a large scale.”
This comes as parts of Sudan’s North Darfur state are “in a state of famine,” according to an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report released in July. This includes the Zamzam refugee camp near the capital El Fasher, home to around half a million people displaced by the civil war.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), around 26 million people in Sudan are in need of assistance – more than half of the country’s population.
More than 10 million people have fled their homes since the civil war broke out in April 2023 and more than half of the population is suffering from acute hunger, the UN OCHA said.
On Tuesday, UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, said the humanitarian crisis in Sudan was “the largest in the world” for children in terms of numbers.
“Tens of thousands” of Sudanese children are in danger of dying if urgent action is not taken, UNICEF spokesman James Elder warned at a press conference. “Thousands of children have been killed or injured in the Sudan war. Sexual violence and recruitment are increasing. And the situation is even worse if sustained humanitarian assistance is denied,” Elder said.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
