Sudanese government agrees to reopen key border crossing for humanitarian aid

A key border crossing for humanitarian aid to enter Sudan will be reopened, the country’s government said Thursday, as the war intensifies, causing a growing number of people in the country to need food, water, shelter, and medical care.

Sudan’s Sovereign Council announced it will open the Adre crossing, on the country’s border with Chad, for a period of three months. It was closed in February by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), which alleged that the crossing was being used to move weapons.

The vital crossing’s reopening follows growing calls for greater humanitarian assistance in Sudan’s Darfur region, as civil war between the SAF and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) continues to ravage the country. Sudan is at a “breaking point,” one United Nations agency said earlier this week.

At a UN Security Council meeting on August 6, the United States accused the SAF of “restricting humanitarians from accessing supplies through the critical Adre crossing.” Similarly, the United Kingdom said the armed forces were “obstructing aid delivery into Darfur, including shutting the Adre crossing, the most direct route to deliver assistance at scale.”

This comes as “famine conditions are prevalent” in parts of Sudan’s North Darfur state, including in the Zamzam camp — located near the state’s capital El Fasher and home to around half a million people displaced by civil war — according to an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report released in July.

Some 26 million people are in need of assistance in Sudan — more than half of the country’s population, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

More than 10 million people have fled their homes since civil war broke out in April 2023 and over half the population faces acute hunger, UN OCHA detailed.

On Tuesday, UNICEF, the UN’s children’s agency, said Sudan’s humanitarian crisis was “the biggest in the world” for children, by numbers,

“Tens of thousands” of Sudanese children are at risk of death if action is not urgently taken, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder warned at a press briefing. “Thousands of children have been killed or injured in Sudan’s war. Sexual violence and recruitment are increasing. And the situation is even worse where an ongoing humanitarian presence remains denied,” Elder said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.