SUDAN WAR: AT LEAST 56 KILLED AS KHARTOUM CLASHES ESCALATE. (PHOTO).

 Sudan war: At least 56 killed as Khartoum clashes escalate

Artillery shelling and air strikes killed at least 56 people across greater Khartoum on Saturday, according to a medical source and Sudanese activists, AFP reported.

Sudan's regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been locked in a battle for power since April 2023 that has intensified this month as the army fights to take all of the capital Khartoum and its sister cities of Omdurman and Khartoum North.

RSF shelling killed 54 people at a busy market in Omdurman on Saturday, overwhelming the city's Al-Nao Hospital, a medical source told AFP.

"The shells hit in the middle of the vegetable market, that's why the victims and the wounded are so many," one survivor told AFP.

Across the Nile in Khartoum, two civilians were killed and dozens wounded in an air strike on an RSF-controlled area, the local Emergency Response Room (ERR) said.

Although the RSF has used drones in attacks including on Saturday, the fighter jets of the regular armed forces maintain a monopoly on air strikes.

After months of stalemate in greater Khartoum, the army retook several bases in Khartoum last month, including its pre-war headquarters, pushing the RSF increasingly into the city's outskirts.

Witnesses said Saturday's bombardment of Omdurman came from the city's western outskirts, where the RSF remains in control.

Saturday's bombardment came a day after RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Daglo vowed to retake the capital from the army.

"We expelled them (from Khartoum) before, and we will expel them again," he told troops in a rare video address.

Greater Khartoum has been a key battleground in nearly 22 months of fighting between the army and the RSF, and has been reduced to a shell of its former self.

An investigation by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that 26,000 people were killed in the capital alone between April 2023 and June 2024.

At least 106,000 people are estimated to be suffering from famine in Khartoum, according to the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, with a further 3.2 million experiencing crisis levels of hunger.

Nationwide, famine has been declared in five areas -- most of them in the mainly RSF-controlled western region of Darfur -- and is expected to take hold of five more by May.