Starvation as a Weapon: Sieges, Blocked Aid and Food Insecurity

The RSF used siege and the deliberate blockage of food, water and medical supplies as a method of warfare against El Fasher and other areas, including intercepting a UN aid convoy and razing farming communities that fed hundreds of thousands. More than 21 million people nationwide are now acutely food insecure.

The RSF's 18-month siege of El Fasher cut the city off from food, medicine and other critical supplies, prompting warnings of mass starvation. The RSF built an earthen wall, or berm, around the city specifically to trap residents and stop food from reaching them, and destroyed the nearby Zamzam displacement camp, which had already been hit by famine.

A UN aid convoy carrying life-saving food to El Fasher in June 2025 never arrived -- one documented instance in a broader pattern experts describe as "food weaponization": the manipulation of food access, infrastructure or supplies for military or political ends, including blocking food supplies, restricting humanitarian aid, leveraging food access for recruitment or control, and destroying agricultural infrastructure, crops or livestock.

Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab found the RSF "intentionally razed" rural farming communities near El Fasher: between March and June 2024, at least 41 communities were attacked, some more than once, substantially reducing agricultural output in a region already facing acute food insecurity affecting more than 21 million people nationwide.

The RSF also besieged the Kalma IDP camp in South Darfur, housing roughly 500,000 IDPs, preventing residents from leaving and denying entrance of essential supplies, leading to deaths -- including of hundreds of children -- from deprivation of survival needs.

The UN Fact-Finding Mission's genocide finding for El Fasher specifically cited the 18-month siege's "deliberately imposed conditions of life" -- through deprivation of food, water, medical care and humanitarian assistance -- as one of the underlying acts constituting genocide, not merely a wartime hardship.

Both warring parties are implicated in blocking humanitarian access, but the RSF's blockade of El Fasher and its camps, combined with looting of aid and attacks on convoys and civilian infrastructure, is highlighted by Human Rights Watch as a central driver of the world's largest current humanitarian crisis, alongside the RSF's other abuses.

Sources

  • Council on Foreign Relations -- Primary source on food weaponization definition, the June 2025 aid convoy incident, and Yale HRL farming-community findings
  • BBC News -- Reporting on the berm, siege duration, and destruction of Zamzam camp
  • ShelterBox -- Context on the 260,000 civilians trapped in El Fasher and the humanitarian access cutoff
  • Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights -- Kalma IDP camp siege and starvation-related child deaths