Students among 17 dead in RSF drone attack in Sudan’s White Nile State 

At least 17  people have been killed, including female students, teachers, and health workers, following a drone attack by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on a secondary school and a health centre in war-torn Sudan‘s White Nile State, in the south of the country, according to the Sudanese Doctors Network.

The attack on Wednesday in the village of Shukeiri also wounded 10, according to Musa Al-Majri, director of al-Duwaim Hospital, the nearest major medical facility to the village.

The network said, “This horrific crime represents a continuation of the violations committed by the RSF in White Nile State. Over the past two days, several civilian facilities have been targeted, including a student dormitory, a power station, and several residential neighborhoods, in an escalation that reflects a continued pattern of targeting civilians without regard for international humanitarian law, which criminalizes such acts.”

After the RSF was pushed out of the capital, Khartoum, in March 2025, by the government aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) it is pitted against, the paramilitary group shifted its campaign to the Kordofan region and the city of el-Fasher in North Darfur, which had been the army’s last bastion in the vast Darfur region until it fell to the RSF in October.

Following the capture of el-Fasher, accounts surfaced accusing the group of mass killings, rape, abductions and widespread looting, prompting the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open a formal probe into alleged “war crimes” by both parties to the conflict.

A recent United Nations report said the RSF’s atrocities in el-Fasher bore all the hallmarks of genocide.

While the world focuses on the United States-Israel war on Iran and its reverberations with Tehran’s retaliatory strikes across the Middle East, the brutal civil war in Sudan is nearly three years long now.

Thousands of people have been killed, and millions have been displaced in a war that has created what the UN describes as the world’s largest displacement and hunger crisis.

According to the latest figures from the World Food Programme, at least 21.2 million people, or 41 percent of the population, are facing high levels of acute food shortages, while 12 million people have been “forced from their homes by the conflict”.