The UN food agency said Friday it has received reports of people dying from starvation in Sudan, where raging fighting is hampering the distribution of aid to those most hungry.
“At the moment, 18 million people were facing acute food insecurity, twice as many as a year earlier,” Leni Kinzli, the UN agency’s spokesperson in Sudan, told a press briefing in Geneva on Friday.
“Hunger would increase from May on, when the lean season started, and crops became less available.”
She cited reports of people “dying of starvation, but those reports had to be corroborated. Millions of people could soon slip into the catastrophic levels of hunger, which could be described as famine.”
She called on parties to the “gruesome” conflict to provide “unimpeded, unobstructed, safe access” for humanitarian agencies to people in need.
Some 3.6 million children under age 5 are suffering from acute malnutrition, she said, adding that the exact number of hungry children is “impossible” to know due to the lack of access to the most affected areas.
Kinzli stressed that the UN agency is currently able to “deliver food to only 10 percent of the hungriest people in Sudan” as the other 90 percent are largely stuck in conflict zones.
Lack of humanitarian access and unnecessary hurdles are making most food distribution “impossible,” she said.
The 10 months of clashes between the Sudanese military, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah al Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, has decimated vast swaths of the northeastern Africa country.
The conflict erupted last April in the capital, Khartoum, and quickly spread to other areas of the country, after months of simmering tensions between the two forces.
The United Nations says at least 12,000 people have been killed in the conflict, although local doctors groups say the true toll is far higher. Over 10.7 million people have been displaced, according to the UN migration agency.