In El Obeid, hunger and fear haunt half a million civilians.

The sky in El Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan state, is no longer a place to which people raise their eyes.

It has become a heavy ceiling where the sound of drones echoes every day; a hospital is bombed today, a school is targeted tomorrow, and a market is spilled after that.

In the besieged city, the electricity was cut off, and the taps died of thirst. The search for water became an open-ended journey with no clear beginning or end, and people didn't know if the water they reached was safe to drink or carried some other danger.

As the siege continued, Al-Abyad became crowded with about half a million people, including one hundred thousand displaced people who fled there in search of safety, only to find new fear.

On the outskirts of the city, inside the “Al-Mahira” camp, women and children have been standing since dawn waiting for something to sustain them. Some return with a container containing a little food, and some return with their hands as empty as when they left.

Famine and epidemic

Amid this devastation, cholera has spread in West Kordofan, with infections exceeding 800 cases, while half a million civilians in El Obeid and North Kordofan are walking on the edge of danger.

Faced with this reality, the United Nations allocated more than one million dollars for water and medicine, hoping to extinguish some of the flames of the crisis.

As for humanitarian aid, the first convoy in a month arrived in South Kordofan last Thursday, carrying 14 trucks of food and 3 trucks of medicine to Kadugli and Dilling.

Meanwhile, clashes in Darfur were driving 3,500 people from their villages in the Umbro locality on July 3, carrying their children and heading into the unknown.

Children are the biggest casualty of this war. A UNICEF report said that 330 children have been killed or injured in Sudan since the beginning of the year, most of them in Darfur and Kordofan.

In North Kordofan alone, since May, 35 children have fallen; 18 died, and 17 were injured.

The victims were as young as two months old, and drones were responsible for 60% of the injuries.

UNICEF representative Sheldon Yett said: “Children are being pushed into an endless cycle of violence, displacement and deprivation. They are being killed in their homes, on the streets and in the markets. Children should never be a target.”

Investigation and international pressure

Away from the White House, in Geneva, inside the Human Rights Council meeting room, 47 countries raised their hands in agreement to open an urgent investigation into what is happening in and around the city.

The council spoke of an “imminent risk of widespread atrocities” and the use of “sexual violence as a weapon of war,” called for a ceasefire, and tasked a fact-finding mission to go to the ground and document.

Sudan’s ambassador, Hassan Hamid Hassan, welcomed the decision, but at the same time described it as “vague” because it did not name any external parties.

The council responded by condemning “all forms of foreign interferenc