El Obeid May Now Hold Twice the People It Was Built For, and No One Has Re-Measured Since the Highway Changed Hands

El Obeid was home to roughly 500,000 people and “may now be sheltering almost twice that number”, the World Food Programme said after country director Abdallah Aldawart visited during the week of 20 July. He called the city “the epicentre of Sudan’s displacement and hunger crisis”, with arrivals from North, South and West Kordofan and from Darfur, and camps overflowing. WFP requires $646 million for June through November. The office of High Commissioner Volker Türk documented 15 drone strikes on El Obeid and surrounding areas across three weeks in June, killing at least 45 civilians. A UNFPA flash update on 2 July said the attacks had become near-daily and were systematically targeting power substations, fuel stations, water facilities and healthcare infrastructure “as part of a sustained campaign to impose siege-like conditions”.

The UN told AFP that more than 1,000 people have been killed by drone strikes by both forces in Kordofan alone since the start of 2026. Aid workers put the national death toll since April 2023 above 200,000 — an estimate, not an official count — with more than 33 million people in need. El Obeid was besieged once before, from April 2023 until the army broke the encirclement in February 2025. On 8 July the Human Rights Council’s Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan warned the city “must not become the next crime scene”, documenting the same pattern of encirclement and strikes on civilian infrastructure that preceded the fall of El Fasher. The International Rescue Committee had warned on 2 July that an imminent RSF ground offensive was pushing North Kordofan toward catastrophe.

On the diplomatic track nothing has moved. The RSF’s 14 July response to Massad Boulos’s US plan accepts an unconditional three-month truce for UN-supervised aid in Darfur, Kordofan, Ed Damazin and the Nuba Mountains — a detail attributed to an RSF official speaking anonymously — while rejecting partial withdrawal from positions in North Darfur and North Kordofan. Burhan, in Asmara on 17 July with Isaias Afwerki, restated that any truce must be preceded by RSF withdrawal from cities. Boulos has publicly said reports that only the withdrawal question remains outstanding are inaccurate.

Assessment: The humanitarian file and the battlefield file are now a week out of sync, and that gap is where the coming misreporting will happen. An open export road is not the same as delivered food: the corridor runs through territory the army says it holds and the RSF is contesting by air, and the aid figures now circulating were measured before Monday’s strikes. Note also who the advance strengthens. The structural deadlock — truce without withdrawal versus withdrawal before truce — was frozen when both sides were stuck. Burhan has less reason to move this week than last, not more.