UNICEF counts up to fifteen power stations struck in October as Sudan’s drone war shifts to infrastructure

UNICEF warned on 11 November that escalating drone attacks on Sudan’s power infrastructure, combined with severe drought, are compounding into a child survival crisis. The agency reported that up to 15 power stations were hit during October 2026, disrupting water supply, healthcare, irrigation and food production, and that failed rains have severely damaged prospects for the 2026–27 harvest. It estimated 825,000 children under five will suffer severe acute malnutrition this year. The figures reached this desk through allAfrica’s regional roundup rather than UNICEF’s own release. The pattern they describe is documented: on 1 November, Sudan Tribune reported RSF drones bombed the Al Dabbah and Abu Hamad power stations in Northern State, knocking both out of service and cutting electricity across northern Sudan, with one civilian killed in a strike on a fuel station. A day later, the cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Kamil Idris declared a maximum state of alert and threatened severe punishment for anyone supplying the RSF with coordinates for strikes on infrastructure.

The only hard kinetic event inside the past 48 hours sits at the other end of the country. On Tuesday 10 November, Sudan Tribune reported that a drone attack struck the village of Bani Shako, in the Keli administrative unit of Kurmuk county in Blue Nile, killing nine civilians and injuring several others. The attribution rests on one named speaker, Kurmuk Commissioner Abdel Ati Mohamed al-Faki, a government-side county official describing a strike in territory the same report says is held by the RSF and its ally the SPLM-North. The Council on Foreign Relations' conflict tracker logged the incident as a “suspected RSF drone strike” on a village “near Ed Damazin” — a different geography from Kurmuk, and a discrepancy neither outlet has resolved.

The civilian ledger is also hardening in North Kordofan. UN News, reporting a Geneva press briefing on 10 November, described El Obeid as subject to “relentless” drone strikes and said Human Rights Council investigators find civilians there living in constant fear of attack from the air. The accompanying UNFPA photograph carried its own data point: El-Obeid Maternity Hospital is under increasing pressure as tens of thousands flee violence in neighbouring South Kordofan — pressure arriving from the south, not only from Darfur to the west. ACAPS recorded roughly 204,000 people, including nearly 39,000 children, fleeing into Al Obeid city and surrounding Sheikan locality between January and June 2026, and in its late-October country update named the city as the leading candidate to become Sudan’s next major urban siege and atrocity-risk flashpoint after El Fasher.

Assessment: The analytically useful thing in UNICEF’s statement is not the malnutrition number but the causal chain it draws. A campaign against transformers and turbines produces famine indicators without producing battlefield movement, and it does so in territory the striking party does not need to hold. That makes the hunger curve partly an engineering problem, and it makes drought — El Niño-induced, affecting roughly half the country — a structural multiplier rather than background. Two cautions. Attribution of individual strikes is being made by officials of the side that was hit, which is a claim, not a finding. And Khartoum’s threat to punish anyone passing coordinates is also a licence for domestic repression.