Geneva – An unprecedented humanitarian collapse is imminent across large parts of Sudan amid the ongoing armed conflict, which is accompanied by deliberate deprivation of food, the destruction of civilian infrastructure essential for survival, and systematic restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid. This catastrophe places millions of civilians at risk of death by starvation, amid continued international failure to halt the conflict and ensure safe humanitarian access.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is following with concern the deterioration in food security and the humanitarian situation in Sudan as the armed conflict enters its fourth year.
Updated figures from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) for Q4 2026 indicate that 21.2 million people are facing high levels of acute food insecurity, including 6.3 million experiencing "emergency" levels of hunger, Phase 4, reflecting severe food deprivation requiring urgent intervention. In addition, around 375,000 people are in Catastrophe, Phase 5, the most severe level, where food insecurity becomes life-threatening. The broader humanitarian crisis now affects around 33.7 million people in need of urgent humanitarian assistance, according to the latest Sudan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Sudan's food insecurity crisis is no longer a temporary supply shortage. It has become a long-lasting and complex hunger crisis that is undermining the foundations of survival for entire communities
Sudan's food insecurity crisis is no longer a temporary supply shortage. It has become a long-lasting and complex hunger crisis that is undermining the foundations of survival for entire communities. Many people have exhausted the coping mechanisms that previously enabled resilience. This deterioration has forced communities in several areas, including parts of Darfur, Kordofan, and Khartoum, to adopt extreme survival strategies such as eating tree leaves, animal feed, and even seeds intended for planting, amid worsening access to basic food and ongoing restrictions that heighten the risk of famine.
Furthermore, severe inflation in the prices of basic goods, driven by disrupted supply chains, currency devaluation, and falling wages and purchasing power, has made securing even a single daily meal extremely difficult for most displaced people and besieged civilians. Local markets are facing growing shortages of grains and other essentials, particularly in conflict and siege-affected areas, where restrictions on humanitarian access and disrupted movement of supplies continue to worsen living conditions and push more people into extreme hunger and deprivation.
The expansion of the conflict into key agricultural states, most notably Gezira State, a central pillar of Sudan's agricultural production, has not only disrupted a single farming season but has driven a cumulative collapse of agricultural cycles and food supplies. Military operations, mass displacement, denial of farmers' access to their land, damage to agricultural infrastructure, irrigation networks, markets, and transport systems, and the looting and destruction of key productive assets have collectively dismantled local production capacity and undermined sustainable livelihoods.
The armed conflict in Sudan has triggered the world's largest displacement crisis. Around 8.9 million people have been internally displaced, and millions more have fled to neighbouring countries due to fighting, attacks on civilian areas, the destruction of essential infrastructure, and widespread insecurity.
This situation reflects a grave failure to comply with international humanitarian law, which requires the protection of civilians and prohibits forced displacement, whether individual or collective, unless required for civilian safety or for imperative military reasons. These are narrow exceptions that must not be broadly interpreted or used to justify the mass removal of a population. Even where evacuation is permitted, it must be temporary and strictly necessary, and parties must ensure adequate conditions for shelter, health, safety, and nutrition, respect for family unity, and safe return once conditions allow.
Women and children bear the brunt of these systematic violations amid the rapid collapse of protection networks and essential services. Women and girls face growing risks due to mass displacement and the breakdown of health and protection services. An estimated 12.7 million people are at risk of gender-based violence, most of them women and girls, while reproductive health services and life-saving maternal care are largely inaccessible or nearly absent in many areas.
Additionally, 17.3 million children in Sudan require urgent, life-saving humanitarian assistance. The United Nations estimates that 4.2 million children will suffer acute malnutrition this year, including more than 825,000 with severe debility.
The systematic destruction of Sudan's health sector is significantly increasing deaths from hunger and treatable diseases. Around 37 per cent of health facilities nationwide remain out of service, depriving millions of people of basic and life-saving care. The health system is also facing repeated attacks and worsening shortages of medicines, personnel, and supplies. This collapse coincides with outbreaks of deadly diseases, including cholera, measles, dengue fever, and hepatitis, particularly in displacement camps and densely populated areas. Poor water and sanitation services and declining health coverage are turning treatable illnesses into causes of death, especially among people weakened by prolonged hunger and malnutrition.
The humanitarian crisis in Sudan is being exacerbated by obstruction of humanitarian access, including military sieges of civilian populations and the blocking of commercial and aid supplies, as seen in El Fasher. In some cases, administrative restrictions also delay, reduce, or prevent life-saving assistance, undermining civilians' right to survival and worsening hunger, disease, and displacement.
The starvation of civilians, whether directly or through the destruction or obstruction of conditions necessary for survival, is a grave violation of international humanitarian law, which prohibits starvation as a method of warfare and bans attacks on, destruction of, removal of, or rendering useless objects indispensable to civilian survival, including foodstuffs, farmland, crops, livestock, water installations, and irrigation systems. It also prohibits arbitrary obstruction of humanitarian relief. These prohibitions are reflected in customary international humanitarian law, including Rules 53, 54, and 55, and in Article 14 of the 1977 Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions.
The deliberate starvation of civilians in a non-international armed conflict constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. When carried out as part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilians, it may also amount to crimes against humanity. It may also constitute genocide when starvation is imposed through conditions of life intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group, including through the deprivation of food and medical care.
The international response to the crisis in Sudan remains gravely inadequate compared with the scale of the catastrophe and the growing civilian needs. This is reflected in a major funding gap in the humanitarian response plan, which, as of April, had received less than 18 per cent of the required $2.87 billion, leaving a shortfall of more than 82 per cent.
The Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese army must immediately cease hostilities across Sudan, strictly comply with international humanitarian law, respect the principles of distinction and proportionality, halt all attacks on civilians and civilian objects, and refrain from any practices that expose civilians to starvation or deprive them of essentials needed for survival.
All military sieges of civilian areas and camps, particularly those imposed by the Rapid Support Forces, must be lifted. The flow of commercial and humanitarian supplies must be allowed without restriction, attacks on crops and food production infrastructure must stop, and health facilities, water networks, markets, transport systems, and other essential civilian infrastructure must be protected.
Additionally, all parties must ensure that border crossings and humanitarian corridors remain safe, open, and operational to enable the rapid and unconditional delivery of aid, relief personnel, and medical and food supplies. They must also prevent the politicisation or obstruction of humanitarian work. Euro-Med Monitor calls for urgent measures to enable farmers to safely access their land, water sources, and production tools, to help prevent the collapse of local food production and reduce dependence on emergency aid.
The United Nations and the international community must move beyond warnings and adopt decisive measures to protect civilians and ensure humanitarian access. This includes sustained political, diplomatic, and legal pressure on the parties to the conflict, support for safe humanitarian access arrangements, and urgent action to close the funding gap in humanitarian response plans.
Euro-Med Monitor calls for targeted international sanctions against individuals and entities involved in obstructing aid, attacking civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, or sustaining the conflict through arms transfers or military, security, or intelligence support.
The UN Security Council must act decisively to ensure accountability for serious crimes in Sudan, including by expanding the referral to the International Criminal Court to cover crimes committed across the country since the start of the current conflict, including starvation, sieges, the destruction of conditions necessary for survival, and obstruction of humanitarian aid.
The Office of the ICC Prosecutor must prioritise crimes involving the starvation of civilians, the destruction of objects indispensable to civilian survival, and the obstruction of humanitarian relief in its ongoing Darfur investigations, with a view to identifying individual criminal responsibility and seeking arrest warrants where appropriate. Euro-Med Monitor also underscores the need to support international and national investigative mechanisms, strengthen evidence collection and preservation, and enable states to exercise universal jurisdiction to prosecute those responsible for these violations.
