“APOCALYPTIC” CONDITIONS
The US earlier on Wednesday announced US$424 million in new aid for displaced and hungry Sudanese as it urged others to ramp up efforts for one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
The assistance includes US$175 million with which the US will buy some 81 million kilogrammes of surplus food from its own farmers to feed people in and around Sudan, American officials said.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, told a UN event that the world must scale up its efforts “massively” as she regretted that many were ignoring “a catastrophe of truly unfathomable proportions”.
“As we sit here today, more than 25 million Sudanese face acute hunger. Many are in famine, some reduced to eating leaves and dirt to stave off hunger pangs – but not starvation,” she said.
“This humanitarian catastrophe is a man-made one – brought on by a senseless war that has wrought unspeakable violence and by heartless blockades of food, water and medicine for those made victims of it,” Thomas-Greenfield said.
“The rape and torture, ethnic cleansing, weaponization of hunger – it is utterly unconscionable,” she said.
She made a new appeal to let assistance into El-Fasher, which has been besieged by the RSF as the paramilitary force seeks a complete takeover of the western Darfur region.
The UN’s refugees chief Filippo Grandi warned on Wednesday that “conditions are apocalyptic” in Sudan.
“If people don’t die because of bullets, they starve to death. If they manage to survive, they must face disease or floods or the threat of sexual violence and other horrifying abuse, which if perpetrated in other places would make daily headlines,” he said.
The World Health Organization said this month at least 20,000 people have been killed. But some estimates are far higher, with the US envoy for Sudan, Tom Perriello, saying that up to 150,000 people may have died – far more than in the war in Gaza.
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