Nearly 700 civilians have been killed in drone strikes in Sudan in just the first three months of 2025, the United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher announced on Tuesday, as the country's catastrophic civil war marks its third anniversary with no end in sight. The conflict — between Sudan's national army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful militia that broke from the military and launched a war for control of the country in April 2022 — has now created what the UN describes as the world's largest humanitarian crisis, with almost 34 million people, nearly two in every three Sudanese, in need of humanitarian support.

The scale of suffering is staggering. More than 11 million people have been displaced from their homes, and at least 150,000 are estimated to have died since the fighting began. Poverty has nearly doubled, surging from around 38 percent before the war to an estimated 70 percent today, according to the UN Development Programme. In the hardest-hit regions of South Kordofan and North Darfur — areas in Sudan's west and centre that have seen the fiercest fighting — up to three-quarters of residents face extreme deprivation. The UN warns that average incomes have collapsed to levels not seen since 1992. Drone strikes have become a near-daily feature of the conflict, particularly in Kordofan, now the war's main battleground, disrupting civilian life and killing hundreds. Women and girls face what the UN describes as systemic and brutal sexual violence, while hundreds of thousands of children are acutely malnourished.

The humanitarian response is severely under-resourced. A UN appeal to raise $2.9 billion for Sudan this year is only 16 percent funded, even as costs are rising sharply — transport expenses alone have climbed 30 percent, in part due to fuel price increases linked to instability in the wider region.