Doctors Describe Systematic RSF Attacks on El Fasher Hospitals

Six doctors described a pattern of deliberate targeting by Rapid Support Forces fighters to the BBC during its investigation into health facilities in el-Fasher. Surgeon Dr Muhamed Suliman, who was based in the city throughout the siege, said the paramilitary group sought to disable the health system to undermine the area’s resilience. “The RSF [were] trying to evacuate the hospitals, to put them out of service because the health system is the cornerstone of any city or any state,” Suliman told the BBC. The investigation identified at least 43 separate attacks on hospitals and healthcare sites between May 2024 and October 2025, some of them struck multiple times.
The Saudi Hospital faced repeated shelling and drone strikes, sometimes as many as 25 times in a single day using precision-guided munitions, according to the doctors who spoke to the BBC. The BBC timeline recorded the progressive shutdown of private hospitals and neighbourhood clinics as the assaults continued through the prolonged siege. On October 28, 2025, RSF ground forces raided the facility after capturing the city, the World Health Organization reported. More than 460 patients and their companions were killed in the assault, which also saw six health workers abducted.
The BBC’s data shows 55 medical workers were killed, 120 injured and 10 forcibly disappeared or abducted in el-Fasher from April 2023 to October 2025. A Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition report drawing on Insecurity Insight data attributed 92 incidents of violence against health care to the RSF in 2025, including 43 health worker killings with half occurring in el-Fasher. The coalition assessment found more than 80 percent of all reported incidents that year were linked to the paramilitary group.
Médecins Sans Frontières reported that RSF fighters raided the South Hospital on June 8, 2024, beating staff including its director general and destroying equipment before forcing the facility to close. The aid organisation had already recorded three earlier strikes by mortar shells and bullets on the hospital between May 25 and June 3, 2024 that killed two people and wounded 14. Surgeon Ezzeldin Asow told Reuters he was performing a procedure at the Southern Hospital when RSF artillery struck the operating theatre in June 2024 and that soldiers beat him during a raid the next day.
The World Health Organization has verified 201 attacks on health care across Sudan since the conflict erupted in April 2023, resulting in 1,858 deaths and 490 injuries. In 2025 alone, the organisation verified 65 attacks that caused more than 1,620 deaths and 276 injuries, accounting for over 80 percent of all such deaths in complex humanitarian emergencies globally that year. A WHO public health analysis issued in October 2026 stated that more than two-thirds of major hospitals in Sudan are now unable to function fully because of staff shortages, medicine deficits and infrastructure damage.
Insecurity Insight has documented at least 691 incidents of violence against or obstruction of health care in Sudan from April 2023 through late 2025, with roughly two-thirds attributed to the RSF. These events have included drone strikes that surged from three cases in 2024 to 24 in 2025, most of them linked to the paramilitary forces in North Darfur and North Kordofan. The RSF has denied the allegations of systematic targeting and described the BBC investigation as propaganda intended to harm its reputation.