EL-OBEID – A single food package, now divided among dozens of families in one distribution, has become the measure of survival inside El-Obeid, a city in Sudan’s North Kordofan that the United Nations said Friday has swelled to more than one million people, nearly double its pre-war population.
Abdallah Alwardat, the World Food Programme‘s Sudan director, described the city as operating at the edge of collapse. “The city continues to be stressed on food, water and fuel,” Alwardat said. “Whatever we are bringing into the city is the only lifeline for these people.”
Before fighting erupted in Sudan in April 2023, El-Obeid’s population stood between 500,000 and 600,000. The Rapid Support Forces’ months-long encirclement of the North Kordofan capital drove displaced people from surrounding areas into the city in successive waves, until the population tipped past one million. Around 120,000 of those people now live in formal displacement camps on the city’s periphery. The rest are absorbed into an urban fabric that was never built to hold them.
WFP said it has reached 100,000 people with food assistance and is working toward a target of 250,000. Arab News reported Friday that Alwardat qualified that number: whether the agency can scale up depends on whether conditions permit. Access to El-Obeid has remained contested, with supply routes subject to restriction and delay from RSF positions around the city. What food WFP has managed to pre-position inside the perimeter is, by the agency’s account, the only margin standing between the population and open famine.
The rations themselves have already been degraded below minimum thresholds. What arrives is divided among multiple families rather than issued to one. The gap between what people need and what they receive is not marginal. Sharing rations is not a stopgap arrangement to be resolved next week; it is the current operating condition of humanitarian aid in El-Obeid.
Sudan’s war, which began on April 15, 2023 in a dispute between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary RSF over the terms of a military integration, has since become the world’s largest displacement crisis. More than 11 million people have been driven from their homes. The death toll is estimated at more than 200,000, though monitoring bodies note the true figure is likely higher. Famine has been confirmed in multiple regions, with North Kordofan among the areas international agencies now watch most closely.
El-Obeid’s doubling is inseparable from the arc of the war. The RSF captured El Fasher, the last SAF stronghold in Darfur, in October 2025, triggering further mass displacement westward. Movement into North Kordofan accelerated as people fled from Darfur, the Kordofan region, and areas around Khartoum. A city already struck by RSF suicide drones, El-Obeid absorbed each successive wave of arrivals even as RSF positions limited what could come in from outside. The resulting pressure has no parallel in Sudan’s recent history.
What makes El-Obeid’s situation particular is its role as the capital of North Kordofan and a commercial hub for the surrounding region. When its fuel supply contracts, the cost radiates outward to every town that depends on it. When its food system fails, the failure is not contained to the city itself. The WFP warning issued Friday was not an abstract projection. Alwardat was describing conditions as they exist now, in July 2026, with one million people inside a siege perimeter and rations already being shared among families who should each receive a full allocation.
The WFP’s target of 250,000 beneficiaries, if reached, would cover roughly a quarter of the population. Whether that target is achievable is a separate and unresolved question. Access agreements in Sudan have a documented history of collapse. Previous ceasefire arrangements have been honoured selectively or not at all, with both the SAF and RSF accused of blocking humanitarian deliveries. The RSF’s expansion from militia to shadow state has transformed access negotiations from diplomatic exercises into something closer to extraction.
The WFP’s position in El-Obeid reflects that ambiguity. The agency is distributing food through corridors that remain open today but carry no guarantee for next week. The gap between its current reach of 100,000 people and its target of 250,000 is not a planning failure; it is the direct product of a war that the international community has proven unable to stop.
Sudan’s civil war has cost the world more than any single peace summit has generated in meaningful commitment. The UN’s 2026 humanitarian appeal for $2.9 billion was funded at roughly 16 percent as of the most recent reporting. El-Obeid, the city that now holds one million people, is surviving on whatever aid convoys can pass through RSF lines on any given day. Alwardat’s warning on Friday was not a forecast. It was a description of what is already happening.
