The Kordofan Observatory announced that 16 civilians had been killed and eight others injured within 48 hours in two drone attacks attributed to the Sudanese Army. The attacks targeted a residential neighbourhood in Ghubaysh and a building used to shelter displaced people in An-Nuhud, West Kordofan state.
Residential neighbourhood and shelter hit
In a statement issued on Saturday, the Observatory said an army drone struck Ghubaysh’s Abu Ba’a residential neighbourhood on Friday, killing four members of one family, including two children. It identified two of the victims as Anwar Abkeir and Abdullah Abkebir, as well as two children from the same family. The Observatory said the neighbourhood contained no military activity or targets that could justify the attack.
The reported toll and the party that launched the drone have not been independently verified on the ground. In another attack in Ghubaysh, a drone targeted a civilian vehicle near the city’s hospital. The vehicle was empty when it was hit, so the attack caused no casualties, according to information available about the incident.
Ghubaysh and An-Nuhud targeted amid displacement fears
Ghubaysh is an inhabited city that has not seen direct military confrontations. It also hosts thousands of displaced people who fled fighting in Kordofan and Darfur. The attack raised fears that residents and displaced people living there could be forced to flee again in search of safer areas. The Ghubaysh attack came one day after a drone struck the An-Nuhud locality government building, also reportedly carried out by the army.
The building was being used as a shelter for people displaced by the war. According to the Kordofan Observatory, the attack killed 12 civilians and injured eight others, most of them women and children. The Observatory said it had verified the nature of the site and the building’s use to shelter people fleeing war zones.
It added that An-Nuhud had endured a continuous series of drone attacks for about a week, causing further civilian casualties whose total number it has not yet been able to determine. According to the toll from the two attacks in Ghubaysh and An-Nuhud that the Observatory said it had verified, 16 civilians were killed and eight injured over two days.
Previous attacks on civilian facilities
The attacks are part of a series of airstrikes during the war that have hit residential neighbourhoods, hospitals, markets, water sources, shelters for displaced people and humanitarian convoys, particularly in Darfur and Kordofan. The Sudanese Army has repeatedly faced accusations of carrying out air raids and drone attacks that struck civilians and civilian objects in areas outside its control, as part of operations against Rapid Support Forces positions and allied groups.
The responsibility for each attack and its toll still require an independent field investigation to gather evidence and identify the perpetrator. The United Nations previously documented a strike attributed to the army that hit Al-Muglad Hospital in West Kordofan in June 2025, killing 41 people, including children and medical workers.
It also documented another drone attack on the Yashfin medical facility in Nyala, South Darfur, in August of the same year, which killed 30 people. In another incident on the Abu Zabad–Al-Fulah road, 10 civilians, including eight children, were killed after two civilian vehicles were targeted by a drone attributed to the army. A similar strike also hit a water source in North Kordofan, causing casualties and disrupting a vital facility on which residents depend.
The frequency of attacks on residential neighbourhoods, health facilities, shelters and civilian transport in areas outside the army’s control has heightened concerns about the impact of air power on civilians, particularly in areas hosting displaced people or lacking functioning health services.
UN documentation of drone attack casualties
The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan concluded that the Sudanese Army had not taken sufficient measures to minimise the impact of airstrikes and artillery shelling on civilians. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk also said his team had documented the deaths of at least 880 civilians in drone attacks between January and April 2026.
These figures are not believed to represent the full toll because of the difficulty of reaching large areas of Darfur, Kordofan and Blue Nile. Documentation efforts have also been hampered by many health facilities being out of service and by some victims being buried without official registration or an independent investigation.
These circumstances limit the ability to verify the overall civilian toll or determine responsibility for each attack separately. The Kordofan Observatory said that targeting residential neighbourhoods, civilian facilities and shelters for displaced people constituted a violation of international humanitarian law and could amount to a war crime.
International humanitarian law requires a distinction between military targets on the one hand and civilians and civilian objects on the other, and prohibits indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. These rules require parties to the fighting to take all feasible precautions to avoid harming civilians.
The Observatory called for the attacks to be monitored and documented, with evidence collected and preserved, including site photographs, remnants of munitions, survivors’ testimonies and hospital records, to help identify and hold those responsible to account and guarantee victims and their families’ rights to justice and compensation.
