PORT SUDAN — A United Nations-led panel formally declared famine conditions across three localities of Sudan’s North Darfur state on Sunday, finding that more than 730,000 people are now experiencing catastrophic hunger and that thousands have already died from malnutrition-related causes since the start of the year.

The classification, issued by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification’s Famine Review Committee at a briefing in Nairobi, applies to the besieged regional capital El Fasher and the displacement camps of Zamzam and Abu Shouk on its outskirts. It is the first time the panel has invoked its highest threshold — IPC Phase 5 — on the African continent since the 2017 declaration in parts of South Sudan.

“The evidence is unambiguous, and it has been unambiguous for some time,” said Dr. Anwar al-Mahdi, an independent Sudanese nutritionist who served on the review panel. “What changed is not the situation on the ground. What changed is that the institutions responsible for verifying it could finally agree on the data.”

The declaration arrived as international attention has begun to swing back to Africa’s largest conflict after seven months in which the war between Israel, the United States and Iran absorbed most of the diplomatic and donor bandwidth available to Sudan’s two-year civil war. Aid officials said the timing was no accident. The Famine Review Committee had been weighing the El Fasher determination since January, but several Western governments had quietly resisted, citing concerns that a formal declaration could complicate ongoing back-channel negotiations between the warring Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

Those reservations have now collapsed under the weight of new mortality data collected by Médecins Sans Frontières and a coalition of Sudanese diaspora medical groups, which documented a fivefold increase in deaths of children under five in El Fasher between October and April. MSF said its surveys, conducted in three of the city’s last functioning health posts, recorded a global acute malnutrition rate of 38 percent — more than double the threshold the IPC uses to define famine.

“We are not preventing deaths anymore. We are counting them,” said Dr. Mariam Yusuf Gibril, MSF’s medical coordinator for Darfur, in a video briefing from Chad. “Mothers are walking three days to reach us with children who weighed eight kilograms a year ago and weigh six kilograms today.”

El Fasher is the only state capital in Darfur that the Sudanese army still controls, and it has been encircled by the Rapid Support Forces since April 2024. Humanitarian convoys have not reached the city in over four months. The last U.N. food shipment of any size was a 17-truck delivery from Adre, on the Chadian border, which was looted en route in late December.

The U.S. State Department issued a statement Sunday afternoon endorsing the IPC findings and calling on the RSF to “immediately lift the siege of El Fasher and permit unimpeded humanitarian access.” A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal deliberations, acknowledged that the Trump administration’s appointment of a dedicated Sudan envoy — announced last week — had come “later than it should have,” and said the department was preparing a new round of targeted sanctions against RSF commanders implicated in starvation tactics.

European response was sharper. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, speaking in Brussels, said the bloc would convene an emergency donor conference in Berlin on May 19 with the goal of raising $1.8 billion against a revised Sudan humanitarian appeal that has so far been funded at only 14 percent. “Sudan has been the world’s largest displacement crisis for eighteen months, and we have allowed it to become the world’s most underfunded one,” Kallas said. “That is a verdict on our own institutions, and it has to change this month.”

The Africa Union’s Peace and Security Council issued a statement from Addis Ababa late Sunday calling the famine declaration “a moral indictment of the international system” and reiterating its support for a Saudi-Egyptian mediation track that has so far failed to produce a durable ceasefire. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who chairs an AU subcommittee on Sudan, said in a Pretoria press conference that he would travel to Port Sudan and to RSF-held territory in West Darfur within two weeks.

Both Sudanese factions reacted with predictable acrimony. SAF spokesperson Brigadier General Nabil Abdullah, in a statement carried by state television, said the famine was “the direct and deliberate consequence of a militia siege” and called on the international community to recognize the RSF as a terrorist organization. RSF political spokesman Mohamed Mukhtar said in a Telegram post that the army had “manufactured this humanitarian narrative” to deflect from its own bombardment of civilian areas.

Regional analysts said the declaration may finally force a recalibration of pressure on both sides — and on the foreign powers backing them.

“The U.A.E. has spent eighteen months insisting it does not arm the RSF, and the rest of the diplomatic world has spent eighteen months pretending to believe it,” said Magdi El-Gizouli, a senior fellow at the Rift Valley Institute. “A formal famine declaration changes the political math. It is much harder for Gulf states to maintain ambiguous positions when the U.N. is officially counting dead children.”

The IPC report also flagged a high risk that famine conditions will spread to South Kordofan and Gezira states within 90 days unless humanitarian access improves. It noted that the cereal harvest expected in November had been planted on only 31 percent of normal cultivated area, raising the prospect of compounding food insecurity into 2027 even if the war were to end immediately.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is expected to publish a revised flash appeal Monday. Officials in Geneva said the Berlin donor conference would be the first major test of whether Western capitals, freshly recovered from the Iran war’s fiscal demands, can summon the same urgency for a conflict that has so far displaced more than 12 million people.