Hundreds of newly arrived Sudanese refugees gather to receive UNHCR relief kits at the Madjigilta site in Chad’s Ouaddaï region. © UNHCR/Colin Delfosse
Saturday 12 July 2025
A massive increase in people fleeing to Tawila in North Darfur over the last three months is propelling the small town into a full-scale humanitarian crisis.
With the rainy season starting, hundreds of thousands of people who just barely escaped horror are bracing themselves for torrential storms, cholera outbreak, and spiraling hunger.
Since April 2025, Tawila has absorbed nearly 379,000 people fleeing repeated campaigns of mass destruction and a year-long siege on Zamzam Camp and Al-Fasher, where famine has also been confirmed. Most are women (70 per cent), children, and people with disabilities, arriving in camps, mostly on foot after days of fleeing for their lives.
Four new camps were set up to cope with the spiraling numbers, and humanitarian organisations are overwhelmed, with prepositioned aid ahead of the rainy season already depleted.
“The situation in Tawila is collapsing,” said NRC’s Sudan Country Director Shashwat Saraf. “Families are surviving on scraps, sleeping in the dirt under a roof made out of straw, with barely any access to clean water and toilets. Cases of cholera are rising, and the rainy season is approaching fast, making living conditions more miserable.”
The families in the camps have been fleeing scenes of extreme violence: April’s raid on Zamzam and Abu Shouk camps left up to 400 dead, many raped, aid workers killed, and survivors risking their lives to flee into Tawila in desperation.
Since April 2023, 782,000 people have been displaced from Al Fasher and Zamzam, including nearly 500,000 in April–May 2025 alone.
A separate assessment by aid agencies and local authorities in Al Fasher found 38 per cent of children under 5 at displacement sites suffer from acute malnutrition, 11 percent with severe acute malnutrition.
“The window for saving thousands of lives is closing fast,” Saraf added. “We need funding and decisive action from the world’s leaders to get aid trucks and relief teams to Tawila – without delays and restrictions from the warring parties – before this spiral completely out of control.”
