NAIROBI — The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system on Saturday formally declared famine across four Sudanese states and large pockets of three others, raising the area under confirmed famine roughly fivefold and prompting United Nations officials to warn that the international response to the world’s largest hunger crisis remained dangerously underfunded as global attention drifted back from the Iran ceasefire.

The classification, issued in a 64-page assessment compiled by the IPC’s Famine Review Committee with inputs from the Food and Agriculture Organization, UNICEF and the World Food Programme, found that famine conditions — the technical threshold of more than 30 percent of children acutely malnourished and a death rate above two per 10,000 per day — were now present in all of North Darfur, large parts of South Kordofan and West Kordofan, much of Sennar, and pockets of Khartoum, Gezira and the Nuba Mountains. The committee said an additional 9.6 million Sudanese were one step below famine, in what the system labels “emergency” conditions.

“We are now looking at the single largest famine event the IPC has classified since the system was created in 2004, by area, by population and by depth,” said Cindy McCain, the WFP executive director, in a video statement issued from Rome. “And we are looking at it with eyes that, for understandable reasons, have spent the last three months somewhere else. That has to change, and it has to change in days, not months.”

The declaration formalized what aid groups inside Sudan had been describing for weeks. Three months of accelerated Rapid Support Forces offensives across Kordofan and Sennar, combined with the closure of the El Geneina border crossing in West Darfur since February, had cut what remained of cross-border aid routes from eastern Chad to a trickle. The Sudanese Armed Forces, which has refused to allow systematic humanitarian access through Port Sudan to RSF-held areas in the west, issued a statement on Saturday rejecting the IPC findings as “exaggerated and politicized.”

In El Fasher, the besieged North Darfur capital that has held out against RSF encirclement for thirteen months, residents reached by satellite phone described conditions that had collapsed beyond recognition since the start of the year. Aid workers with the Sudanese Doctors Network said the city’s last functioning therapeutic feeding center, run out of a converted school in the Abu Shouk camp, had begun turning away severely malnourished children on Wednesday because it had run out of ready-to-use therapeutic food.

“We are choosing which children we can save,” said Dr. Mohamed Adam Ibrahim, a pediatrician with the network who has remained inside El Fasher since the siege began. “When you have ten cases and food for three, you become an instrument of triage in a war you did not choose. This is not medicine. This is something else.”

Sudan’s civil war, which began in April 2023, has produced what the U.N. estimates is now the largest displacement crisis in the world, with more than 12 million people forced from their homes — roughly a quarter of the country’s prewar population — and a documented death toll exceeding 180,000, a figure widely regarded as a substantial undercount. The Iran war, which dominated humanitarian attention from early March through the April 15 ceasefire, drew donor pledges of more than $4 billion in five weeks. Sudan’s 2026 humanitarian appeal, by contrast, remained 18 percent funded as of Saturday, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs financial tracking service.

OCHA chief Tom Fletcher, briefing reporters in Geneva, said the Iran emergency had necessarily absorbed disaster-response capacity but warned that the post-ceasefire moment risked producing what he called “a deeply uneven recovery in attention.”

“There is no version of a coherent international system in which the country with the largest famine on the planet receives less than a fifth of its needs while a ceasefire elsewhere mobilizes billions in five weeks,” Fletcher said. “I am not making a moral comparison between crises. I am pointing out that we have a basic accounting problem.”

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, in a statement from Brussels, said the bloc would convene an emergency Sudan donor conference in Addis Ababa on May 18, co-hosted with the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development. The figure under discussion as a fresh pledge target was $3.2 billion through year-end, according to two European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because the figure had not been formally agreed. The diplomats said Brussels would press the United Arab Emirates and Egypt — both of which have been accused by United Nations panels of providing material support to opposing sides in the war — to contribute meaningfully and to align on a single political track.

In Washington, the State Department issued a statement saying Secretary Marco Rubio had spoken on Friday with the African Union Commission chairperson and the Saudi foreign minister about reviving the moribund Jeddah talks framework. A senior State Department official, speaking on background, said the administration was open to a Sudan-specific supplemental request but acknowledged that any new appropriation would face an exhausted Congress already wrestling with an $89 billion Iran war supplemental and a contested AI grid bill.

Analysts said the famine declaration would intensify pressure on the SAF, headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and on the RSF, led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, to accept humanitarian corridors that both sides have intermittently blocked.

“A formal famine classification has historically narrowed the political space for parties to a conflict to be seen as legitimate interlocutors,” said Layla Hassan, a Beirut-based analyst with the International Crisis Group. “Burhan and Hemedti both want to be received in foreign capitals. The IPC made that significantly more uncomfortable for both of them this morning.”

In Port Sudan, the de facto wartime capital where the SAF-aligned government operates, a foreign ministry spokesperson said the government would receive any donor delegation but rejected what it called “attempts to equate the legitimate state with a militia.” The RSF political office, which has maintained a Nairobi presence since last year, said it welcomed the IPC findings and accused the SAF of using siege tactics to manufacture starvation — an accusation aid groups have leveled, with documentation, against both sides.

Inside displacement camps along the Chad-Darfur border, where more than 750,000 Sudanese refugees were sheltering in conditions UNHCR has repeatedly described as unsustainable, residents said the declaration was overdue.

“The world has a word for what is happening to us now,” said Fatima Adam Ishaq, 34, a mother of four sheltering at the Adre transit site after fleeing El Geneina last year. “It does not change what is in front of us today. But maybe tomorrow it changes what arrives at the gate.”

OCHA officials said an updated allocation from the U.N.’s Central Emergency Response Fund would be announced on Monday, and that an inter-agency mission would deploy to El Fasher within ten days if security conditions allowed.