Saudi Arabia on Tuesday announced an international conference next week to gather aid pledges for war-ravaged Sudan, where the United Nations says more than half the population urgently needs assistance and protection.
Many of them are in Sudan's Darfur region, where attacks against civilians could amount to crimes against humanity, the U.N.'s head of mission said.
The pledging conference will be held on June 19, the official Saudi Press Agency said. It cited the Foreign Ministry and added that the kingdom would jointly lead the meeting with Qatar, Egypt, Germany and the European Union, as well as U.N. agencies.
Saudi Arabia and the United States have been mediating in the eight-week war between Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who leads the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
A record 25 million people, more than half the population, are in need of aid and protection, according to the U.N., but as of late May, the world body's needs for $2.6 million to address the crisis were only 13% funded.
Entire districts of Khartoum no longer have running water, electricity is only available for a few hours a week, most hospitals in combat zones are not functioning, and aid facilities have been looted.
The country's western Darfur region has also been a center of the fighting. Darfur Governor Mini Minawi, a former rebel leader now close to the army, in early June declared Darfur a "disaster zone" and appealed for help from the international community.
In May, the warring sides signed a written agreement for a Saudi and U.S.-brokered weeklong cease-fire, later extended by five days, that aimed to provide safe humanitarian corridors. These did not materialize.
Sudan's annual rainy season begins in June, and medics have repeatedly warned that it threatens to make parts of the country inaccessible, while raising the risks of malaria, cholera and waterborne diseases.
More than 1,800 people have been killed since battles began, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED).
Fighting has forced nearly 2 million people from their homes, including 476,000 who have sought refuge in neighboring countries, the U.N. says.
The head of the U.N. mission in Sudan, Volker Perthes, on Tuesday said the situation in Darfur "continues to deteriorate," with "an emerging pattern of large-scale targeted attacks against civilians based on their ethnic identities, allegedly committed by Arab militias and some armed men" in RSF uniforms.
If these reports are verified, they "could amount to crimes against humanity," Perthes said.
Also Tuesday, a government official said Sudan's army chief is not ready to meet Dagalo, after a regional bloc proposed a face-to-face encounter between the two.
At a summit held in Djibouti on Monday, the East African Intergovernmental Authority on Development announced it would expand the number of countries tasked with resolving the crisis, with Kenya chairing a quartet including Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan.
