At least 68 killed in Sudan in heavier than normal rainy season

DUBAI/CAIRO (Reuters) - At least 68 people have been killed during a heavier than usual rainy season in Sudan this year, the interior ministry said on Tuesday, as shelters collapsed and neighbourhoods flooded, piling further misery on the war-torn country.

The conflict between Sudan's army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which shows no signs of abating despite talks beginning this week, has created the world's largest displacement crisis and pushed half the population into food insecurity.

Administrative hurdles, security challenges, and under-funding have made aid deliveries in many parts of the country difficult if not impossible.

The rains, the heaviest since 2019, have impacted areas of the west, north, and east of the country where 10.7 million are displaced in camps, hosted in homes and schools, or stranded in the open air.

Those include famine-struck Zamzam camp in North Darfur, home to 500,000, and the eastern states of Kassala and al-Gedaref where hundreds of thousands have fled an RSF advance.

More than 44,000 people have been displaced by the rains since June 1 across the country, according to reports from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

"Families are losing what little they have left, and critical infrastructure has been washed away, disrupting vital humanitarian aid," said Mohamed Refaat, IOM Sudan mission chief, on Tuesday, adding that 73,000 people across 11 of Sudan's 18 states were affected in total.

The interior ministry said that 12,000 homes had fully or partially collapsed due to the rains and some 198,000 feddans of farmland had been damaged, though its numbers only reflect the areas to the north and east of the country which the army controls.

(Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz and Nafisa Eltahir, additional reporting by Rachel More; Editing by Mark Potter)