One Strike, One Blackout: How El Obeid Lost Its Hospitals in a Week

On the morning of June 19, 2026, a drone operated by Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) struck the main power transformer serving El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan State. The city went dark. Within hours, the Sudanese Doctors Network reported that the blackout had forced dialysis centres and hospital emergency departments to close — facilities that an estimated one million residents and displaced persons depend on for critical care. Water stations, also reliant on the power grid, shut down. The same day, RSF drones struck multiple other locations across the city, including fuel stations supplying the generators that might otherwise have provided backup power. By nightfall, El Obeid had effectively lost both its electricity and a significant share of its healthcare capacity simultaneously.

This was not an isolated strike. It was the latest in what Sudan Tribune described, citing local sources, as a "week of daily RSF drone strikes on El Obeid" — a sustained campaign that has progressively eroded the infrastructure on which the city's civilian population survives. The Emergency Lawyers human rights group, which monitors violations in Sudan's conflict zones, warned on June 19 of an "imminent risk of gross violations against civilians" as RSF forces massed outside the city while Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) positioned within. The group specifically condemned attacks on the power grid, fuel stations, and supply roads connecting El Obeid to neighbouring areas as violations of obligations under international humanitarian law. The following day, June 20, bridges south of Um Ruwaba along a key supply corridor were struck by drones, threatening the movement of aid and civilians through North Kordofan's interior.

The Dialysis Problem

Dialysis — kidney replacement therapy — is among the most infrastructure-dependent medical interventions in existence. It requires uninterrupted electricity to power the machines, a reliable supply of clean water for the filtration process, and trained staff physically present at the bedside for sessions typically lasting three to four hours, three times per week. Patients in end-stage renal disease cannot survive without it; a missed session is not merely uncomfortable — it becomes medically dangerous within days. When El Obeid's power was cut and fuel for backup generators was simultaneously cut off by attacks on fuel stations, dialysis patients across the city lost access to treatment not because of supply chain failures or funding shortfalls, but because the physical infrastructure needed to deliver it had been deliberately removed from the equation. The Sudanese Doctors Network, in a statement on June 19, called on the UN and international organizations to pressure the RSF to halt attacks on civilian infrastructure and ensure the restoration of essential services.

That call joins a long queue of similar appeals that have not produced measurable changes in the conduct of the war. Since the conflict between the SAF and RSF erupted in April 2023, the World Health Organization has verified 214 attacks on healthcare facilities across Sudan, resulting in 2,042 deaths and 785 injuries. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, 13 such attacks were verified, killing 184 people and injuring 295. A drone strike on Al Deain Teaching Hospital in East Darfur in March 2026 killed 64 people, including 13 children and multiple medical staff, and left the hospital non-functional. A strike on Al Jabalayn Teaching Hospital in White Nile State on April 2 killed 10 health workers, including the medical director, and destroyed the emergency room and operating theatre. El Obeid's June 19 blackout — achieved by targeting power infrastructure rather than a hospital directly — represents a variation in method that achieves the same outcome: healthcare facilities that cannot function.

West Kordofan: Cholera Without Access

While the El Obeid attacks dominated the June 22 OCHA Security Council briefing on Sudan, the same briefing flagged a parallel health emergency unfolding in neighbouring West Kordofan. As of June 16, 700 cases of cholera had been recorded in the state, with 60 associated deaths — a case fatality rate of approximately 8.6 per cent, well above the 1 per cent threshold that typically signals serious gaps in treatment access. In the two and a half weeks between June 1 and June 16, a further 100 cases and 10 deaths were recorded, indicating that the outbreak was not slowing. OCHA attributed the persistence of the outbreak to "limited humanitarian access and insecurity, ongoing displacement, and inadequate access to safe drinking water and sanitation."

Cholera spreads through contaminated water and deteriorates rapidly when the sick cannot reach oral rehydration treatment or intravenous fluids. In a context where water stations have been shut down in El Obeid by deliberate attacks on the power supply, and where insecurity has disrupted the movement of humanitarian workers trying to reach affected communities in West Kordofan, the structural conditions for a worsening cholera situation are in place across the Kordofan region as a whole. UN agencies and partners have attempted to respond — establishing cholera treatment centres in West Kordofan, distributing supplies, running awareness campaigns — but OCHA's own framing acknowledges that these efforts are operating in a constrained environment. The UN repeated its call for all parties to uphold their obligations under international humanitarian law and to facilitate "rapid, safe, unhindered, and sustained humanitarian access."

A System That Was Already Depleted

Sudan's healthcare system did not enter the June 2026 crisis from a position of strength. Three years of war have left 37 per cent of health facilities across the country's 18 states non-functional, according to WHO figures from April 2026. An estimated 21 million people require health assistance — more than 40 per cent of the country's population. Disease outbreaks, including malaria, dengue, measles, polio, hepatitis E, meningitis, and diphtheria, are active in multiple states simultaneously. Healthcare workers, already stretched thin, have been killed, injured, or displaced in large numbers; the deliberate targeting of medical staff — verified in the Al Jabalayn attack and others — has compounded the personnel deficit. Functioning facilities face shortages of medicines, diagnostic equipment, and consumables, as supply chains have been disrupted by three years of fighting, aerial bombardment, and blockade of humanitarian corridors.

Into this context, El Obeid's June 19 blackout arrives not as an isolated shock but as one more subtraction from a system that has been progressively hollowed out since April 2023. The Sudanese Doctors Network's framing of the crisis is precise: the attacks "threaten the lives of more than one million residents and displaced persons" — not through direct violence, but through the elimination of the conditions in which healthcare is physically possible. Dialysis requires electricity. Emergency surgery requires electricity. Water treatment requires electricity. When an attack on a power transformer achieves all of these closures simultaneously, it is not a coincidence. It is a predictable consequence that any military planner would understand.

International Warning, No Ceasefire

On June 23, 2026 — the day after OCHA briefed the Security Council on conditions in El Obeid — European Union and United States officials issued warnings against an imminent RSF ground assault on the city. The warnings came amid reports of continued military mobilization around El Obeid's perimeter, raising the prospect that the city's already compromised healthcare and civilian infrastructure could face further damage from direct combat. The Emergency Lawyers group, which has documented the targeting of civilian infrastructure, has called for the immediate opening of humanitarian corridors and for both parties to observe their obligations under international law.

Whether those calls produce any change in behaviour will determine the trajectory of El Obeid's healthcare capacity — and the health outcomes of the patients who depend on it. The dialysis machines are offline. The generators are without fuel. The water stations are closed. In West Kordofan, cholera continues to spread. The UN has called for access; the parties continue to strike infrastructure. That gap between statement and action is, as of late June 2026, the defining feature of the humanitarian situation in Kordofan.