Sudan Humanitarian Truces: Why They Fail & Who Bears Responsibility

SAF and RSF were not always adversaries. Both took part in the political order that followed the removal of longtime ruler Omar al-Bashir in 2019, and jointly carried out the October 2021 coup that derailed Sudan’s civilian transition. The alliance broke over an unresolved question at the center of that transition: how, and how fast, the RSF would be folded into a regular army chain of command. That dispute over security-sector reform became a shooting war on April 15, 2023.

Three weeks into the war, the United States and Saudi Arabia brought SAF and RSF representatives to Jeddah. On May 11, 2023, both sides signed the Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan — a reaffirmation of obligations under international humanitarian law, not a peace agreement. It committed both forces to protect civilians, allow safe passage out of combat areas, protect hospitals and medical workers, avoid using civilian infrastructure for military purposes, and facilitate humanitarian access — and it committed them to work toward a short-term ceasefire, which followed on May 20, 2023, as a seven-day pause meant to enable aid delivery.

It did not hold. By late May 2023, the United States publicly stated that both SAF and RSF had committed violations of their Jeddah commitments — military activity during the ceasefire window, occupation of civilian buildings, attacks, looting and obstruction of humanitarian operations. Talks were suspended in June 2023 and resumed intermittently through the rest of the year without producing a durable ceasefire.

A ceasefire becomes durable when both sides conclude that continued fighting is worse than compromise. Sudan has repeatedly failed that test, and not for one reason.

North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, was the Sudanese army’s last major foothold in Darfur and had been under RSF siege for more than 500 days. On October 26, 2025, the RSF took full control of the city after Sudan’s 6th Infantry Division withdrew. The International Organization for Migration estimated roughly 62,000 people fled the immediate area between October 26 and 29. In the days that followed, the United Nations and Amnesty International documented what UN officials called atrocities amounting to a mass killing of civilians — house-to-house searches, arbitrary detentions and summary executions. Amnesty International’s July 2026 report on the events called them “a stain on the conscience of humanity.”

El Fasher’s fall happened while the Quad’s September 2025 roadmap was still being discussed. It is the clearest case in this entire history of a diplomatic process being overtaken by facts on the ground rather than shaping them — and it hardened SAF’s subsequent negotiating position: any 2026 ceasefire proposal, it argues, must require the RSF to give back exactly the kind of city it took in North Darfur.

Four internationally brokered frameworks have now tried to move Sudan from a civilian-protection promise to an actual ceasefire. Laid side by side, they share a structure — short pause, then permanent ceasefire, then political transition — and share a failure point: none has produced the first step at national scale.

On February 24, 2026, Sudan’s SAF-led government formally rejected the US-backed ceasefire roadmap before the UN Security Council. Fighting continued, and its character changed: a UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for the Sudan report submitted to the Human Rights Council’s 63rd session, published September 3, 2026, found reasonable grounds to believe both SAF and RSF committed serious violations of international humanitarian law through drone operations — some amounting to war crimes — and that expanded drone capability let both sides strike hospitals, schools, markets and displacement camps far from any active front line.

The mission documented specific incidents: a double-tap drone strike on Ed Daein Teaching Hospital in East Darfur on March 20, 2026, killed 70 people and wounded 146; repeated RSF drone strikes on El Obeid between May and July 2026 degraded the city’s electricity, fuel and water infrastructure; and a sequence of strikes on Kalogi, South Kordofan hit a kindergarten during a ceremony, then hit first responders, then a vehicle carrying casualties to hospital, killing 114 people, around 60 of them children. Overall, the mission found more than 1,000 people were killed in drone strikes in the first five months of 2026 alone. The report also identified foreign contractors, including from Colombia, operating and maintaining drone systems used by the RSF.

On September 16, 2026, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the humanitarian situation “absolutely horrible” and said there should be accountability for countries supplying weapons used to attack civilians — directly tying the failure of Sudan’s truces to the states that keep both sides equipped to keep fighting.

Rather than score which side is “worse,” this table tracks each major agreement against what independent sources actually reported afterward. Confidence labels reflect how well-documented each claim is, not how serious it is.