MSF suspends operations at key Khartoum hospital amid violent attacks

People displaced by conflict prepare to board a bus from Port Sudan on January 7, 2025 to return home to the southern city of Singah in Sennar province, which was retaken by the Sudanese army forces from the Rapid Support Forces in November 2024. [ AFP]

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said Friday it was forced to suspend activities at a key hospital in the capital of war-ravaged Sudan after months of violent attacks.

MSF said its teams had faced threats and seen numerous attacks against patients over 20 months at the facility.

"We've had to suspend our activities in the Bashair Hospital in Khartoum," MSF Secretary-General Christopher Lockyear told AFP, adding that the facility had "seen many attacks across the course of this war."

"We've had fighters in the hospital, threatening medical staff," he said. "It's becoming untenable for us to work there."

Sudan has been torn apart and pushed towards famine by the war that erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Tens of thousands of people have been killed, millions displaced, and the conflict has left more than 30 million people -- over half of them children -- in dire need of aid.

The Bashair hospital, which is one of the only remaining facilities in south Khartoum offering free medical care, is in an area controlled by RSF fighters.

MSF said armed fighters had repeatedly entered with weapons and threatened medical staff, often demanding that fighters be treated before other patients.

In November, a patient was shot and killed inside the hospital, and in December, attackers fired weapons inside the emergency ward, threatening medical staff, MSF said.

Lockyear said the "tragic decision" to halt activities at the hospital was "not taken lightly", and came "after engaging with all of the warring parties around our presence in this hospital."

But he said it had become impossible to treat patients safely.

"We can't continue to operate in a situation which is immediately violent as that."

The decision comes as the hospital is caring for surging numbers of patients arriving with violent trauma injuries amid escalating fighting.

"Sometimes dozens of people arrived at the hospital at the same time after shelling or air strikes on residential areas and markets," MSF said.

Last Sunday, 50 people were brought to the emergency room – 12 of them already dead – after an air strike one kilometre from the hospital.

MSF stressed it was continuing to work in 11 states in Sudan, adding it hoped "conditions will allow us to return to Bashair Hospital in the future and restart medical activities."