The news cycle has been filled to bursting, has it not? Just this week (and it’s only Thursday), we have multiple Olympic Games stories, Israel took out two of its enemies’ leaders, one from Hamas and one from Hezbollah, hostages were released from Russia, Kamala Harris saw record-breaking fundraising numbers in the first week of her campaign and the Utah Supreme Court upheld a block on the state’s strict abortion ban while a lower court challenge goes forward.
In the meantime, famine has officially reached at least one of Sudan’s large refugee camps and the death toll is rising. An estimated 500,000 people are living in the Zamzam refugee camp outside of Darfur. In April, Claire Nicolet, head of Doctors Without Borders’ emergency response in Sudan, said: “What we are seeing in Zamzam camp is an absolutely catastrophic situation. We estimate that at least one child is dying every two hours in the camp.” It has gotten worse.
New assessments from Mercy Corps reveal that 9 in 10 children in Sudan are suffering from life-threatening malnutrition. Mercy Corps Country Director for Sudan Sibongani Kayola says that the situation has become so dire that even cash assistance will not save the children. “There’s an urgent need for specialized health interventions, including comprehensive nutritional support, emergency stabilization centers, medical care, and continuous monitoring of affected children, while ramping up the overall humanitarian response to prevent more deaths.”
Experts who monitor global hunger rarely make an official declaration of famine, but today, the U.N.-backed famine early warning systems network (Fews Net) said it had evidence to confirm people were starving to death in Zamzam camp, and it was possible the worst levels of hunger were also present in Abu Shouk and Al Salam camps. Fews Net only declares famine after it has confirmed mortality rates have reached extreme levels, which it says have been evidenced in Zamzam for up to two months.
There are levels of food insecurity and hunger, from temporary to chronic, and from Phase 1, which is food secure, to Phase 5, which is a catastrophe/famine. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) makes a determination of famine when starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition are or will likely be evident. A famine classification is given when “at least 20% of households in a given area face an extreme lack of food, at least 30% of children are suffering from acute malnutrition, and two people or four children for every 10,000 are dying each day due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease.”
The war between rival military factions in Sudan created the world’s largest hunger crisis. According to the World Food Program, more than 25 million of the country’s 48 million people face crisis levels of hunger. The country also has the world’s worst displacement crisis, with almost 11 million people internally displaced or having fled to neighboring countries. Those numbers include more than 5 million children. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, almost 19,000 people have been killed and over 33,000 have been injured since hostilities began in April of 2023. Earlier this week, a hospital in the northern Darfur region was hit, resulting in almost 100 people killed or injured, according to reports from the United Nations.
Earlier today, Doctors Without Borders said RSF was blocking trucks carrying its supplies — including food and medicine for those in Zamzam camp — from reaching its facilities in the city. Sudan’s military is also preventing aid trucks from crossing into Sudan from Chad.
“We desperately need our trucks to arrive,” Stéphane Doyon, who leads the aid group’s emergency response in Sudan, said in a statement. “If the blockade on humanitarian aid is not lifted as a matter of urgency, there is going to be an even greater death toll.”