Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court said Monday they are taking steps to preserve evidence from Sudan's Darfur region of possible war crimes carried out by a paramilitary force after it seized a key government stronghold and reportedly killed hundreds of people.
The court "is taking immediate steps regarding the alleged crimes in El-Fasher to preserve and collect relevant evidence for its use in future prosecutions," the prosecutor's office said in a statement.
The alleged atrocities "are part of a broader pattern of violence that has afflicted the entire Darfur region" and they "may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity," the statement said.
The ICC announcement came as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global hunger monitoring group, warned that famine has spread to two regions of Sudan, including el-Fasher and the city of Kadugli in the province of South Kordofan.
It marks the latest crisis in a war that has created the world’s largest humanitarian disaster.
Last week, the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group, captured the key city of el-Fasher after besieging it for 18 months.
Witnesses have reported fighters going house to house, killing civilians and committing sexual assaults. According to the World Health Organization, groups of gunmen killed at least 460 people at a hospital and abducted doctors and nurses.
Many details of the hospital attack and other violence in the city have been slow to emerge, and the total death toll remains unclear.
The fall of El-Fasher heralds a new phase of the brutal, two-year war between the RSF and the military in Africa's third-largest country.
The ICC's chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, told the Security Council in January that there were grounds to believe both government forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Force, may be committing war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide in Darfur.
Karim Khan has stepped down temporarily as the ICC chief prosecutor pending the outcome of an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, which he denies.
Sudan has been torn apart since April 2023 by the fight for power between the military and the RSF.
More than 40,000 people have been killed, according to U.N. figures, but aid groups say the true number could be many times higher.
The war has driven more than 14 million people from their homes, fueled disease outbreaks and pushed parts of the country into famine.
In its latest report, the second in less than a year, the IPC said famine - or IPC Phase 5 - has been announced in el-Fasher and Kadugli, which it said experienced "a total collapse of livelihoods, starvation, extremely high levels of malnutrition, and death". The IPC is considered the leading international authority on hunger crises.
In total, about 375,000 people have been pushed into famine in Darfur and Kordofan as of September, the report said. Another 6.3 million people across the country are in IPC Phase 4, meaning they face extreme levels of hunger, it said.
Famine, or IPC Phase 5, is determined in areas where at least 1 in 5 people or households severely lack food and face starvation and destitution, at least 30% of children under 5 suffer from acute malnutrition and deaths from malnutrition-related causes reach at least two people, or four children under 5, per 10,000.
Across the country, the IPC said more than 21 million people, or 45% of the population, faced acute food insecurity as of September, a 6% drop from the previous report which covered the period from December 2024 until May this year.
The IPC called for a ceasefire as the sole measure that "can prevent further loss of life and help contain the extreme levels of acute food insecurity and acute malnutrition.
