The Immunity

Dr. Hamed Suleiman was the Medical Director of Al-Jabalain Hospital in White Nile State. On April 3, during a children’s immunization campaign, a drone operated by the Rapid Support Forces struck the hospital twice — once on the operating theatre, once on the maternity ward. Ten people were killed, seven of them medical staff. Dr. Suleiman was among them. So were Dr. Qisma Mohamed Fadlallah and Dr. Ilham Hamed. The Committee for Justice documented five more: Ibrahim Hamed, Abed Mokhtar, Afaf Nouh, Abdallah Mokhtar, Ibrahim Hamed Bishara.

Esperanza Santos, MSF’s head of emergencies for Sudan: “The attack is even more appalling as it occurred during a children’s immunisation campaign.”

The RSF has not publicly responded.

Fourteen days earlier, on the night of March 20 — the first night of Eid al-Fitr — a Sudanese Armed Forces drone struck Al-Daein Teaching Hospital, the main referral facility for two million people across East Darfur. Two waves, twenty minutes apart. The WHO’s updated count: seventy dead — thirteen children, seven women, a doctor, two nurses. One hundred and forty-six injured. The hospital is no longer functional.

Hala Khudari, WHO’s deputy representative in Sudan: “An attack on a hospital is not only an attack on a building. It is an attack on people seeking care, on health workers risking their lives to save others, and on the very possibility of survival in times of crisis.”

Sudan’s Foreign Ministry rejected the attribution, claiming the strike hit a police station nearby. The two-wave pattern, the confirmed destruction of the hospital, and the seventy dead make the denial a formality. Two million people in East Darfur have no referral care.

Two hospitals. Two armed forces. Fourteen days.

The RSF struck a hospital during an immunization campaign. The SAF struck a hospital on the first night of Eid. Both used drones. Both struck facilities performing the most protected categories of activity under international humanitarian law.

This is not a symmetry argument. The RSF accounts for roughly two-thirds of verified attacks on healthcare since the war began. The pattern is not equal. But what the bilateral structure reveals is not about proportion. It is about what happens to a legal protection when both parties in a conflict operate outside it simultaneously, and neither faces consequence.

The WHO has verified 217 attacks on healthcare since April 15, 2023. Two thousand and fifty-two people killed. Eight hundred and ten injured. In 2025, Sudan accounted for 82 percent of all deaths from attacks on healthcare verified by the WHO globally.

Sudan is roughly four percent of the world’s population. Eighty-two percent of the people killed in healthcare attacks worldwide last year were in Sudan.

The documentation is meticulous. The WHO’s Surveillance System for Attacks on Health Care verifies each incident — date, location, facility type, casualties, attributed perpetrator.

The prosecution record is zero.

The mechanisms that should translate documentation into prosecution each fail for specific structural reasons. The International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission, the treaty body for investigating grave breaches of IHL, requires consent of the party under investigation — structurally unavailable when both armed forces are the violators. The International Criminal Court has jurisdiction in Darfur through a 2005 Security Council referral, but Al-Jabalain lies in White Nile State, outside that mandate; even within Darfur, the only completed trial addresses crimes from 2003. National courts do not function across a country divided between two armed forces. No ad hoc tribunal has been proposed.

The protection of medical facilities exists in every layer of international humanitarian law — Geneva Conventions, Additional Protocols, Common Article 3, customary IHL. The rule is not ambiguous. It is not debated. The enforcement architecture was never built to function in the conditions under which it is needed. Consent-based investigation cannot reach parties that will not consent. Limited-jurisdiction courts cannot cover a national conflict. Domestic justice cannot operate where the judiciary has collapsed.

Healthcare facilities in Sudan are not caught in crossfire. They are selected — by both sides, independently, with drones, at times of maximum civilian presence. The two-wave pattern at Al-Daein, twenty minutes between strikes — long enough for rescuers to arrive before the second hit — is not incidental targeting. It is operational design.

Dr. Hamed Suleiman directed a hospital during a civil war. He ran immunization campaigns in a conflict zone. On April 3, a drone struck the maternity ward where he worked.

Under international humanitarian law, his hospital had immunity. Under the conditions of this war, so does the force that destroyed it.

Sources