The International Federation for Rights and Development (IFRD) condemns in the strongest possible terms the drone strike that hit Al-Daein Teaching Hospital in East Darfur on 20 March 2026, killing scores of civilians, including children, women, patients, and medical personnel, and rendering one of the region’s most critical hospitals non-functional. Reuters first reported the death toll at at least 64, while later WHO-linked reporting indicated the toll had risen to 70 killed and 146 injured as more victims were pulled from the rubble.
This was not merely an attack on a building. It was an attack on the wounded, the sick, the displaced, and the very possibility of survival in a region already pushed beyond collapse. Al-Daein Teaching Hospital reportedly served more than 2 million people across East Darfur and surrounding districts. Its destruction has left civilians without essential emergency, surgical, pediatric, obstetric, gynecological, and dialysis care, forcing many to travel long distances in a war zone for treatment that may now come too late.
Available reporting points to grave concerns that this was not a random incident. The RSF and other observers blamed the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for the strike, while the Sudanese military denied deliberately targeting the hospital and claimed a nearby police station was the intended target. At the same time, reporting citing Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab said satellite analysis showed multiple precise impacts on the hospital and no visible damage to surrounding buildings, raising deeply alarming indications that the facility itself may have been directly targeted.
If a hospital was deliberately struck, this would constitute a profoundly serious violation of international humanitarian law and may amount to a war crime. Even if the strike were claimed to have aimed elsewhere, an attack that devastates a major civilian medical facility and kills patients and health workers reflects a catastrophic failure to respect the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. Hospitals are protected spaces. They are not battlefields.
IFRD calls for an immediate, independent, and international investigation into the strike on Al-Daein Teaching Hospital, including the chain of command, the platform used, the targeting process, and all individuals responsible for ordering, facilitating, or executing the attack. We further call on the international community, including the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union, and relevant accountability mechanisms, to act with urgency to protect medical infrastructure in Sudan and ensure that attacks on civilians do not continue with impunity. The normalization of drone warfare against civilian infrastructure in Sudan is intolerable and must end.
Sudan’s civilians are not collateral damage. Its children are not acceptable losses. Its hospitals must not be turned into mass graves.
