The United Nations’ top official in Sudan on Tuesday said intensifying drone attacks on civilian infrastructure are disrupting electricity, water and fuel supplies, putting lives at risk and hampering humanitarian aid.
Denise Brown, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator, said hundreds of aid trucks are stranded because of fuel shortages and that hospitals are struggling to keep lifesaving services going, including dialysis. She urged the international community to intervene to end the fighting and to provide urgently needed funding. “This is not about politics. This is about people,” she said.
Brown told UN News there has been an intense pattern of drone strikes over the past couple of weeks. She said the strikes appear to be targeted attacks on civilian infrastructure, which is protected under international humanitarian law, and that sources of energy and fuel appear to be systematically targeted and destroyed. She called that an apparent violation.
Colleagues from the World Health Organization were at a hospital just outside Khartoum when the electricity went out because of the strikes, she said. The hospital has no generator and no solar panels, and treatment stopped for 25 people who need dialysis. She said the outages also affect women giving birth, children and other patients, and that water supplies are disrupted as well.
In Khartoum, fuel queues stretch kilometres, Brown said. Tuk-tuk drivers who take people to work and to market, and who earn a daily wage, have waited several days in a row for fuel and are not earning an income. Markets and displacement sites have also been hit, she said.
The UN humanitarian community works with international and national non-governmental organizations and with local communities, which she said are consistently the first to respond. The priority is to save lives, she said.
Severe rainfall deficits over the past couple of months have added to what she called a pre-existing catastrophe. Farmers have faced a lack of rain, and in some parts of Darfur and Kordofan people are moving in search of food, she said. Millions remain displaced because of the war, basic social services have been disrupted, and the health system has been decimated despite best efforts, according to Brown.
Severe acute malnutrition is very high and exceeds the emergency threshold in many parts of the country, particularly areas directly affected by the war, according to studies by the UN Children Fund, she said. Partners are trying to get services and supplies to people who would die without that assistance, she said.
Brown said the UN supply chain for food, nutritious products, shelter and other items is a major part of the response, but hundreds of trucks are stuck for lack of fuel. Without fuel, aid cannot move food, support children with severe acute malnutrition, or provide tents to people who have left their homes, she said. Agencies sometimes face bureaucratic impediments, which they work with the authorities to overcome, and there has been huge progress on visas and permits, she said.
The World Food Programme, which moves thousands of trucks carrying food when local markets do not have it, has had seven hits on its convoys this year and 20 over the past two years, Brown said. Those attacks caused loss of life and loss of food meant for people who needed it most, she said. Staff try daily to reach difficult places, including Dilling in South Kordofan and parts of Blue Nile, Darfur and West Kordofan, and getting supplies in safely takes constant negotiation, she said.
Inside Sudan, the UN role is to be present where people need help and to talk with communities, she said. Reports of conflict-related sexual violence surrounding the atrocities in El-Fasher in October 2025 are sky-high, with thousands and thousands of incidents, she said. The humanitarian community raises those concerns with the authorities and with other actors, according to Brown.
Brown said she does not know where the drone strikes are coming from. She said those sending the strikes bear responsibility first, and that UN member states need to understand what is happening and work to temper the situation. People who need lifesaving dialysis cannot get it, women are giving birth with no lights, and operations cannot take place, she said.
She said aid groups have shown they can deliver in difficult conditions but need funding to do more. The World Food Programme is cutting both the number of people it serves in Sudan and the size of rations, she said. In a camp in Abu Shandi in Blue Nile a couple of weeks ago, people told her they needed food, and she had to ask them to be patient, she said.