PORT SUDAN, Sudan, May 1, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - Sudan's paramilitaries have killed at least 165 civilians in 10 days in their assault on El-Fasher, the last major city in Darfur to elude their control, activists said on Wednesday.

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF), locked in a brutal conflict with the regular army since April 2023, pounded the besieged city with more than 750 mortar rounds and artillery shells, the city's resistance committee, a volunteer aid group, said.

The committee said the death toll had been confirmed by health facilities. It said residential neighbourhoods, markets and displacement camps had been hit in what it described as a "bloody massacre".

The battle for El-Fasher has intensified in recent weeks as the RSF has sought to compensate for its loss of the capital Khartoum last month.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said he was "appalled by the increasingly catastrophic situation" in North Darfur state and its capital El-Fasher.

Guterres was "deeply concerned by reports of harassment, intimidation and arbitrary detention of displaced people at checkpoints", his spokesman Farhan Haq said in a statement.

The war, now in its third year, has killed tens of thousands people and displaced 13 million.

With the army holding the centre, east and north, and the RSF controlling nearly all of Darfur and parts of the south, the conflict has effectively divided the country in two.

Famine has been declared in five areas of Sudan, three of them displacement camps outside El-Fasher which have been battlegrounds in the recent fighting.