PORT SUDAN, Sudan, Sept 25, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - A drone strike on a market in Sudan's besieged city of El-Fasher killed 15 people, a medical worker at the local hospital told AFP on Wednesday.

The Tuesday strike "killed 15 citizens and wounded 12, three of them critically", the medic said, requesting anonymity for his safety.

The local resistance committees, activists who coordinate aid and document atrocities in the Sudan conflict, called the attack a "massacre" that killed or wounded a total of 27 people, and accused the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of carrying it out.

As the humanitarian situation in the city worsened, US Africa envoy Massad Boulos said Wednesday he was hopeful that humanitarian aid would soon be able to re-enter.

"Hopefully, in the coming few days, we will start seeing the flow of this much-needed aid," he said.

The RSF is currently waging its fiercest assault yet in an attempt to seize El-Fasher, which it has besieged since May last year.

"In this case, the RSF, we've been talking to them, and we've agreed on a way to allow this humanitarian aid to go in. So it's taking shape as we speak," Boulos added.

The war, which broke out between the RSF and the regular army in April 2023, has killed tens of thousands of people and forced millions from their homes.

- Trapped civilians -

The battleground Darfur city of El-Fasher has been laid waste by bombardment by the RSF, whose fighters have overrun the displaced persons' camps around the city.

The United Nations estimates that children make up around half of the 260,000 civilians trapped in the city, which has been cut off from nearly all external aid.

On Friday, an RSF drone strike killed at least 75 people at a mosque in the city, 11 of them children aged six to 15, the UN children's agency said.

Medical staff at El-Fasher hospital have run out of nearly all supplies, "reduced to using bits of mosquito net instead of gauze to bandage wounds," the medic told AFP, using a satellite internet connection to circumvent a communications blackout.

"The most painful thing is watching the wounded suffer in pain, and we don't have the medicine to treat them," he said.

El-Fasher is the last city in Darfur still in army hands and its capture would give the RSF control of all of the vast western region's population centres.

The paramilitaries and their allies stand accused by the United Nations and human rights watchdogs of carrying out atrocities against non-Arab ethnic groups in the region.

Among them are the Zaghawa, who make up most of the fighters in the Joint Forces alliance fighting alongside the army in El-Fasher.