Local governor says the attack knocked out a nearby power station for the fourth time since the war began two years ago.

A suspected drone attack by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary has killed at least 11 people at a displacement camp in River Nile state, authorities said.

In a statement late on Friday, the local governor said the attack knocked out a nearby power station for the fourth time since the war between the RSF and the Sudanese army began two years ago.

The attack marks a deadly escalation in the ongoing conflict, with a further 23 people injured, a medical official said. Witnesses said at least nine children were among the wounded.

“My son, my cousin, my daughter’s husband and two children, my cousin’s children are dead. The boy is 10 years old and the girl is about two years old,” witness Haleema told Al Jazeera.

Over the past months, the RSF has been accused of attacking power infrastructure in Sudanese army-controlled areas across central and northern Sudan.

The RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, denies carrying out drone attacks.

Friday’s attack hit a makeshift camp roughly 3km (2 miles) from the Atbara power station outside the town of al-Damer.

The camp housed about 180 families who had fled fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and were living in abandoned buildings and tents with minimal humanitarian assistance.

“The first drone attack came and landed right behind us,” said Mawaheb Mohamed, another survivor of the attack.

“Fifteen minutes later, another one came – four in total. He decided to leave because the scene was very difficult, there were corpses, people had been dismembered, and people in the hospital.”

Following the attack, authorities were seen hosing down the smouldering remains of tents and belongings, as residents boarded buses headed to an unknown location.

The escalation came amid a wider collapse of Sudan’s power grid, with drone and missile attacks plunging millions into weeks-long blackouts, further worsening the humanitarian crisis in a country devastated by civil war.

Sudan descended into violence in April 2023 when tensions between the Sudanese army, led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the RSF erupted into open conflict.

Al-Burhan has been celebrating recent gains made by the military, including in Khartoum, while ground fighting is currently concentrated in the Darfur region, where the RSF is battling to eliminate remaining army positions, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee.

The conflict has triggered one of the world’s largest displacement crises. According to the United Nations, more than 12.4 million people have been uprooted from their homes, including 3.3 million who have fled to neighbouring countries.

Soldiers in Indian-administered Kashmir have demolished the homes of two men suspected of carrying out the disputed region’s deadliest attack against civilians in nearly two decades.

Police say the attackers are members of The Resistance Front (TRF), a faction of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). Pakistan rejects the allegation.

Meanwhile, Indian security forces have launched a huge manhunt for those responsible for killing 26 men in Pahalgam on Tuesday.

Authorities have released wanted posters with sketches of three suspects: Adil Hussain Thokar, a suspected Kashmiri rebel, and two Pakistani citizens identified as Ali Bhai and Hashim Musa. They are also searching for Ashif Sheikh, another suspected rebel.

The family members of the two suspected rebels were also detained for questioning after the attack, a police officer and their relatives said.

Sheikh’s sister Yasmeena said soldiers cordoned off the area around their house in Kashmir’s southern Tral area late on Thursday night.

“One soldier climbed over the mud compound wall of our home,” said Yasmeena, who gave only one name.

“After some time, a big, frightening blast brought the house down. Everything inside was destroyed,” she said, adding that no one was inside the home at the time.

A police officer said soldiers also destroyed Thokar’s family home in neighbouring Bijbehara area in the same manner early on Friday.

“Both [suspected rebels] have been active for three to four years, and are part of TRF, which is an offshoot of LeT,” the officer told AFP news agency on condition of anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media.

“They are wanted militants [rebels] involved in earlier attacks as well on security forces,” the officer added.

Police have also offered a two million rupee ($23,500) bounty for information leading to each man’s arrest.

These are the key events on day 1,157 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Here is where things stand on Saturday, April 26:

Fighting

A senior Russian general was killed in a car bomb attack in Moscow’s eastern suburb of Balashikha, in what Russian investigators and Kremlin authorities said was a “terrorist attack”.
Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik, 59, a member of the Russian General Staff, was killed when a Volkswagen Golf exploded after an improvised explosive device was triggered.
The Kremlin swiftly blamed Ukraine for the car bomb, the latest in a series of Russian military officers and pro-war figures to be assassinated since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Kyiv did not comment on the claims by Moscow that it was behind the killing.
Russian war bloggers described Moskalik as a rising star. He had participated in several high-level Russian delegations that had met Western officials to try to negotiate a settlement to the conflict in Ukraine.

Russia continued its bombardment of Ukraine on Friday with a drone striking an apartment building in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Pavlohrad, killing three people and injuring 10 others,
A child and a 76-year-old woman were among the civilians killed in the nighttime drone strike on Pavlohrad, in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, the head of the regional administration, Serhii Lysak, wrote on Telegram.
Russian forces fired 103 Shahed and decoy drones at five Ukrainian regions, Ukraine’s air force reported. Authorities in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy and Kharkiv regions reported damage to civilian infrastructure but no casualties.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the site of the deadly Russian attack in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv that killed at least 12 people on Thursday.
Zelenskyy said Russian forces used the attack on Kyiv as cover to launch almost 150 assaults on Ukrainian positions along the roughly 1,000-km (620-mile) front line.

Today, together with diplomatic representatives of the states and international organizations operating in Ukraine, we visited the site of the ballistic missile strike in Kyiv. The very place where the explosion of the missile claimed the lives of 12 of our people. My… pic.twitter.com/ncz8eXhioo

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) April 25, 2025

President Zelenskyy also said that components manufactured by US companies were found in a missile used in the Kyiv attack.

Ceasefire

Speaking to reporters, Zelenskyy reiterated that Ukraine’s position on the Russian-annexed Crimean Peninsula had not changed, as the United States was reported to be pressuring Kyiv to give up the territory as part of ceasefire talks with Moscow.
“Ukraine will not legally recognise any temporarily occupied territories. It seems to me that this is an absolutely fair position, it is legal not only from the point of view of the Constitution of Ukraine, first of all, but also from the point of view of international law,” Zelenskyy said.
“I agree with President Trump that Ukraine does not have enough weapons to regain control of the Crimean Peninsula with weapons. But we and the world have sanctions options,” he added.

Zelenskyy’s comments came as US President Donald Trump said in an interview published Friday that “Crimea will stay with Russia”, the latest example of how he was pressuring Ukraine to make concessions to end the war.
President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met Russian President Vladimir Putin for three hours in Moscow on Friday to discuss the US plan to end the war in Ukraine.
Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said Witkoff and Putin had a “constructive” conversation, including “a discussion on the possibility of renewing direct negotiations” between Kyiv and Moscow. Ushakov said the meeting had brought the US and Russian positions on Ukraine “closer together”.
Trump said in a social media post after Witkoff’s meeting concluded that it was a good day of talks and called for a high-level meeting between Kyiv and Moscow to close a deal.
“Most of the major points are agreed to,” Trump said in the post after landing in Rome for the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday.

Diplomacy

Ukrainian Zelenskyy has suggested that he may not attend the funeral of the late Pope Francis in Rome on Saturday due to the increase in Russia’s attacks on his country and his attendance at a “military meeting”. Referring to the possibility of cancelling his trip to Rome, Zelenskyy said: “For me, it was important to be here.”
“If I cannot make it, Ukraine will be represented with dignity. The Foreign Minister [Andrii Sybiha] and the First Lady [Olena Zelenska] will be present,” Zelenskyy told journalists in Kyiv.
President Trump demanded on social media that Zelenskyy “IMMEDIATELY” sign a long-delayed agreement giving the US access to Ukraine’s mineral resources.
“Ukraine, headed by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has not signed the final papers on the very important Rare Earths Deal with the United States. It is at least three weeks late,” Trump said