Sudan’s warring sides have agreed a nationwide, 24-hour ceasefire from Saturday morning, the Saudi-led mediators said, following a week of intensified fighting after a previous truce deal lapsed.

Iran PressAfrica: The mediators said the ceasefire was “an effort to break the cycle of violence” between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which began battling each other eight weeks ago, sparking a major humanitarian crisis.

The conflict has displaced more than 1.9 million people, some 400,000 of whom have crossed into neighbouring countries. The urban area around Sudan’s capital Khartoum, home to at least five million people, has been turned into a war zone, and unrest has also flared in the conflict-scarred western region of Darfur.

Fighting continued on Friday, with residents reporting artillery fire and clashes in the north of Omdurman, across the confluence of the River Nile from Khartoum, and air strikes in Bahri, a third adjoining city that makes up the wider capital.

Medical charity MSF said fighting had intensified significantly in Khartoum since Tuesday, resulting in a surge of patients to a hospital where it is working.

Another city where the conflict has triggered clashes is El Obeid in North Kordofan State southwest of Khartoum, which lies on a main route between the capital and Darfur, the RSF’s power base.

A doctors’ group said in a statement that the city had been suffering from water outages for more than a month, shortages of food, medicine and fuel, and two weeks of power cuts. Twelve kidney dialysis patients had died due to the impact of the war and dozens more were at risk, it said.

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