Symbolic imageUN Women reports drone attacks and sexual violence around water collection in Sudan's al-Obeid
UN Women said on 24 July 2026 that women and girls in the besieged Sudanese city of al-Obeid face drone attacks when they fetch water by day and harassment, rape and other sexual violence when they go out after dark. The agency described the North Kordofan capital as a place with no safe time of day for water collection. It comes weeks after the UN human rights chief warned of a humanitarian catastrophe in the city amid intensified fighting between Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
What happened
On Friday, 24 July 2026, UN Women reported that women and girls in al-Obeid, the capital of Sudan's North Kordofan state, are exposed to the threat of drone attacks during the day and to sexual violence at night when they leave their homes to fetch water in the besieged city. According to the agency, there is no safe moment for this: daytime drone strikes have pushed many to collect water after nightfall, where they encounter harassment, rape and other forms of sexual violence. Access to food and health care in the city is limited. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that civilians in al-Obeid have lived under siege-like conditions for 18 months, with critical shortages of drinking water and relentless drone attacks, and warned of a possible repetition of the atrocities that occurred in al-Fashir, North Darfur, last year. UN Women said it did not have disaggregated data for al-Obeid itself, but noted that some 500,000 people are in the city, roughly 70 percent of them women and children, and that it expects high levels of need for support against sexual violence. Across Sudan, an estimated 12.7 million women and girls are projected to need specialised gender-based violence services this year alone — four times the figure at the start of the war, according to UN Women data. The agency added that funding cuts to women-led organisations are shrinking the available response: two-thirds of the Sudanese women's organisations it surveyed reported that safe spaces and gender-based violence services had been closed or significantly reduced. The war, now in its fourth year, is fought between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary militia, and has produced one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, with widespread reports of sexual violence and other abuses.
The camps
The available source does not carry a statement from either warring party. UN Women's account describes the pattern of drone attacks and sexual violence around water collection without attributing the acts in al-Obeid to a named side, and neither the Sudanese Armed Forces nor the Rapid Support Forces is quoted responding to the report. What both the UN bodies cited and the reporting agree on is the underlying military situation: fighting in and around al-Obeid has intensified between the army and the RSF, and the city has been cut off. Any assignment of responsibility for the specific attacks described remains unaddressed in the material at hand.
The view from outside
The report reached readers outside the conflict largely through the Geneva-datelined Reuters account carried by outlets such as the Brazilian daily Folha de S.Paulo, which presented it without commentary as a UN finding and framed Sudan's war as one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. The emphasis in that framing is on scale and on the collapse of assistance — the 12.7 million women and girls estimated to need gender-based violence support, and the funding cuts closing the services meant to reach them — rather than on the military balance between the two sides.
What's new
The subject is new to this digest. What UN Women added on 24 July is a specifically gendered account of daily life under the siege, describing water collection itself as the moment of exposure and documenting that daytime drone attacks have shifted the risk into the night. It builds on the warning issued earlier this month by the UN human rights chief about an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in al-Obeid, and introduces both the 18-month siege timeline and the explicit comparison with al-Fashir in North Darfur a year earlier.
What could happen next
If the fighting between the army and the RSF around al-Obeid continues at its current intensity, conditions described by the UN — water shortages, restricted food and health access, drone attacks — would persist, and the comparison drawn by the UN human rights chief with al-Fashir would remain the reference point for what a further escalation could mean. A second course would see the warnings translated into pressure for humanitarian access or a local pause, which would depend on the consent of the parties controlling and encircling the city. A third concerns the response capacity itself: with two-thirds of surveyed women-led organisations reporting closed or reduced services, the gap between documented need and available support could widen further unless funding for those organisations is restored.
Sudanese Armed Forces: No position on the UN Women report is documented in the available source; the army is one of the two parties whose intensified fighting around al-Obeid the UN describes.
Rapid Support Forces: No position on the UN Women report is documented in the available source; the paramilitary force is the army's opponent in the fighting around the besieged city.