The UN’s main food agency has warned that families trapped within the besieged Sudanese city of el-Fasher face starvation.

The World Food Programme (WFP) said it had not been able to deliver food to the city in the western Darfur region by road for more than a year.

El-Fasher has been surrounded by paramilitary fighters from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) for nearly16 months – determined to seize it from Sudan’s army.

The WFP warning comes as local activists have already begun reporting deaths by starvation in the city, which is home to about 250,000 people.

Sudan’s civil war that erupted in April 2023 has created what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The WFP said severe food shortages had drastically driven up prices for scarce supplies in el-Fasher, and cited reports that people were eating animal fodder and food waste to try to survive.

The agency did not name the party responsible – but the RSF has cut trade routes and blocked supply lines to the only city in Darfur currently controlled by the army.

“Everyone in el-Fasher is facing a daily struggle to survive,” said Eric Perdison, WFP’s regional director for Eastern and Southern Africa.

“People’s coping mechanisms have been completely exhausted by over two years of war. Without immediate and sustained access, lives will be lost,” he added.

The agency quoted an eight-year-old girl, Sondos, who had fled el-Fasher with five family members.

“In el-Fasher there was a lot of shelling and hunger. Only hunger and bombs,” the girl said, adding that the family had been surviving on only millet.

The WFP said it had trucks loaded with food and nutrition assistance ready to go if it got guarantees of safe passage.

It sent such a convoy in early June: but that was attacked, with the army and the RSF blaming each other for the strike.

Since then, the UN has been pushing for a week-long humanitarian truce in el-Fasher.

But it is not clear how either side would respond to another attempt for an aid convoy to break the siege.

Sudan’s civil war has also led to claims of a genocide in Darfur.

More than 150,000 people have died in the conflict across the country since 2023, and about 12 million have fled their homes.

—BBC