Sudan, half a million people locked inside el-Obeid

The city of el-Obeid, capital of the Sudanese state of North Kordofan, is at the centre of a siege that, according to the United Nations, is trapping around half a million people. The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are tightening the ring as they attempt to consolidate control over the Kordofan and Darfur regions, and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has warned of the risk of a humanitarian catastrophe in the city, according to the account by Al Jazeera based on statements by the OHCHR and testimonies gathered on the ground.

The measurable signs of a siege, when access is closed off and direct counts are impossible, are almost always the same: the price of food and the price of water. In el-Obeid, the testimonies gathered report, food prices have risen by up to 300% and water has doubled. These are second-hand figures, declared as such, but they describe a city where the market has stopped functioning as a market and survival depends on who controls the roads leading in.

“Civilians have endured siege-like conditions for eighteen months” (transl. from English) — Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

The reason this situation must be watched now, and not when the final tallies arrive, lies in what has already happened elsewhere in the same conflict. In al-Fasher and Kadugli, famine conditions are not a hypothesis: they have been confirmed by the IPC system, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, in a joint statement by United Nations agencies reported by UNICEF, which reports hunger, malnutrition and blocked humanitarian access together across large areas of the country. A confirmation of famine is not a rhetorical formula: it is a technical threshold, declared only when the available data surpass it, not when the situation begins to worsen.

There is also a precedent weighing on the political judgment. In February 2026 the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan concluded that the RSF’s actions in el-Fasher bear the characteristic features of genocide against the Zaghawa and Fur communities, as stated in the OHCHR statement. This is a finding by an investigative body, not a court ruling: the distinction must be kept firm, because conflating an international finding with a criminal judgment is the quickest way to render a fact that actually matters unusable. But it is also the reason why the alarm over el-Obeid is not a generic prediction: it concerns the same armed actor and the same pattern — encirclement, blocking of entry points, collapse of basic prices.

What we know and what we don’t

The number of people trapped — around 500,000 — is a United Nations estimate, not a census. In a besieged city, population movements are constant and independent verification on the ground is limited: the figure should be read as an order of magnitude. What is not uncertain, however, is what is missing: humanitarian workers are not entering large portions of the country, and without entry there is neither relief nor data collection.

The three sources underpinning this article — an international news agency, the UN human rights office and the humanitarian agencies using the IPC system — converge on one point, and diverge on nothing substantial: Sudan has moved from a phase in which famine was feared to one in which famine is measured and classified in at least two locations. The open question is whether el-Obeid will be added to the same list.

At the international level, the Sudanese dossier is not today producing the reactions that conflicts involving far fewer people caught up in them tend to produce. The difference lies not in the severity of the facts — a siege that has lasted eighteen months according to the UN High Commissioner, an investigative finding on the features of genocide in el-Fasher — but in the distance from the chains of attention: none of the parties involved is an energy supplier, a major trading partner or an actor threatening shipping routes.

The concrete fact to build on is that of access: until convoys get in, any assessment of the number of people facing hunger conditions in el-Obeid remains an external estimate, and the only verified figures for Sudan remain those from al-Fasher and Kadugli.