Ahmad 
A UN official in Sudan announced that the fighting in the city of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, over the past two days has led to the death and injury of many civilians, damage to infrastructure and large-scale displacement.
Toby Harward, the U.N. deputy humanitarian coordinator for Sudan (Darfur), said in a post on platform X that “an escalation of the conflict would be catastrophic for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people who have sought refuge in the city.” Harward added that the UN office in Sudan receives reports of widespread recruitment of children between the ages of 11 and 17 into the ranks of warring parties and armed groups in El Fasher, in serious violation of children’s rights and international humanitarian law.
Battles between the army and the Rapid Support intensify
This weekend, renewed clashes between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces in several neighborhoods in the city of El Fasher erupted and violent confrontations erupted.
Eyewitnesses said that a number of artillery shells landed on citizens’ homes. El Fasher was once a shelter for displaced people who fled other parts of Sudan’s conflict.
The RSF controlled four of Darfur’s five states, the army maintained its headquarters in El Fasher, and the RSF controlled large parts of Kordofan region bordering Darfur and the capital Khartoum.
Darfur crisis brings Sudan closer to returning to Article VII
The catastrophic situation in Darfur and a set of indicators push for the return of Sudan to Article VII, which allows the deployment of international forces in conflict zones to protect civilians from war crimes committed against them.
The Darfur region has been witnessing UN movements in recent days to identify the humanitarian and security situation there.
The Security Council warned that Sudan was heading towards a breaking point as fighting between the army and the RSF continued, calling for a different approach to the long-standing problem in Darfur. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, said in a statement last Wednesday that the fighting had led to the displacement of some eight million people. This coincided with US-led moves to activate the special law on the arrest of former President Omar al-Bashir’s regime members who were involved in crimes against humanity in western Sudan, as it included Ahmed Haroun, one of Bashir’s aides, on its list of war crimes suspects’ guidance rewards program, which offers rewards of up to five million dollars.
The International Criminal Court accuses the warring parties in Sudan of committing war crimes.
ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan said both sides in Sudan’s conflict were committing crimes in violation of international law in the western Darfur region, calling on the UN Security Council to apply the law and abandon the old approach.
In a briefing to the Security Council via video link from the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, Khan explained that his clear conclusion and assessment is that there are reasons to believe that the crimes under the Rome Statute are currently being committed in Darfur by both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their affiliated groups.
After the outbreak of the current war, the humanitarian situation in Darfur has worsened dramatically amid reports of major violations committed there, including aerial and ground bombardments, liquidations, burning and looting that have killed thousands and displaced some two million to neighboring Chad and Central African Republic.
Observers said the continued crimes against civilians in Darfur were due to the failure to prosecute those involved in similar acts during the previous war that broke out in 2003, which killed and displaced about 3 million.
In 2009, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for al-Bashir and 18 of his associates, including his aide Ahmed Haroun and his defense minister, Abdurrahim Mohamed Hussein, but none of them were handed over to court despite the fall of al-Bashir’s regime in 2019.