RSF shelling kills at least 56 across greater Khartoum

# RSF shelling kills at least 56 across greater Khartoum

*Event date: 2025-02-01*

Artillery shelling and air strikes killed at least 56 people across greater Khartoum on Saturday, according to Arab News Pakistan, with one of the deadliest attacks hitting a busy market in Omdurman. The report says at least 54 people were killed there alone, overwhelming the city’s Al-Nao Hospital.

The source places the violence in the wider war between Sudan’s regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which have fought since April 2023. It says the army and RSF were locked in intensified combat as the army pushed to retake Khartoum, Omdurman and Khartoum North. That framing is enough to show the market strike was part of a broader urban battle rather than a stand-alone incident.

The report also says two civilians were killed in Khartoum in an air strike on an RSF-controlled area, while dozens more were wounded. The Emergency Response Room described the toll and the pressure on local medical services. The excerpt further says the war has uprooted more than 12 million people and pushed many health facilities out of service.

Because the source is already detailed, the article should not add new numbers or identify victims the excerpt does not name. It should, however, note that witnesses said the shells hit the middle of the vegetable market and that the hospital lacked shrouds, blood donors and stretchers. Those details help explain why the casualty count climbed so quickly.

The result is a stark civilian toll in the middle of a long-running battle for Sudan’s capital region. The supported story is simply that RSF shelling and air strikes killed dozens, with marketgoers in Omdurman taking the worst of it.

The report also reminds readers how concentrated the pressure on Khartoum has become. Greater Khartoum has been reduced to a shell of its former self, according to the source, and the war has already forced millions to flee. The market deaths on this day fit that larger pattern: the city’s ordinary public spaces have become front lines.

That is why the article should focus on the civilian harm and the immediate medical strain rather than the broader military chessboard. The dead were not abstract casualties; they were people in a market, and the hospital system around them was already stretched thin.

The shelling also landed on a health system that was already barely functioning. When a hospital is short of blood, stretchers and even shrouds, casualty counts can climb not only because the attack was heavy but because the rescue environment is so fragile. That is the larger warning embedded in the Arab News Pakistan report: the war is not only killing civilians directly, it is making ordinary emergency care harder to deliver in the moments that matter most.

That is why the report feels especially grim. In wartime Sudan, a market death toll is never just about the shells themselves; it is also about how quickly hospitals can absorb the wounded and how much basic care is still available when the attack hits. The article should therefore read the reported numbers as both a casualty count and a measure of institutional collapse. When Al-Nao Hospital is overwhelmed, the violence has already reached the edge of what the city can handle.