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CAIRO: At least 11 children were killed in a drone strike that hit a mosque in the besieged city of El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, the UN children’s agency said on Monday.
Local aid groups, activists, and the Sudanese army accused the Rapid Support Forces of launching the drone that struck the mosque during Fajr prayers early on Friday, killing at least 70 people.
UNICEF’s Executive Director Catherine Russell, in the Monday statement, called the attack “shocking and unconscionable.” 
Russell said initial reports indicated that at least 11 children between the ages of 6 and 15 were killed and “many more” were injured in the attack, which also damaged nearby homes.
The strike in the besieged city of El-Fasher destroyed the mosque, and many bodies were trapped under rubble, said a worker with the local aid group Emergency Response Rooms on Friday. 
The strike comes as the army and the RSF are fighting increasingly intense battles as part of the country’s ongoing civil war. 
The war has killed at least 40,000 people, according to the World Health Organization, displaced as many as 12 million others, and pushed many to the brink of famine.
Three doctors also died in the attack, according to the Preliminary Committee of Sudan’s Doctors Trade Union and Sudan Doctors Network. 
They were among 231 medical personnel killed since the war in Sudan broke out, according to Sudan Doctors Network.
“The latest attack has torn apart families and shattered any sense of safety for children who have already suffered so much,” said Russell, adding that the RSF’s siege of El-Fasher has trapped children who endure violence and have little access to food, clean water, and health care while being “forced to witness horrors no child should ever see.”
Antoine Gerard, Sudan deputy humanitarian coordinator with the UN, said on Monday that they were seeing more attacks on civilians now inside El-Fasher, who are also struggling to seek safety outside the city due to the siege and lack of safe routes.
“We are quite concerned about targeting civilians, targeting the population and particularly hospitals, mosques and schools, and any other civilian premises,” he said.
In a statement on Sunday, Egypt condemned the drone strike on the mosque. 
It said the attack “constitutes a blatant violation of international humanitarian law, denouncing the targeting of places of worship and innocent civilians in the conflict.”
Fighting over the control of El-Fasher and surrounding areas in North Darfur intensified by early April, and more than 400 civilians have been killed in RSF attacks in the region since April 10, according to a Friday report by the UN’s human rights office. 
The majority were killed in a major offensive that seized the nearby Zamzam displacement camp. 
The camp was turned into an RSF military base used to launch assaults on El-Fasher, according to the report.

UNITED NATIONS: Israel will skip an emergency UN Security Council meeting on Gaza scheduled for Tuesday because of the Jewish New Year, its envoy to the UN said calling the timing “regrettable.”
As a country directly affected by the deliberations of the UN’s top security body, Israel had been invited to address the Council’s discussion of the devastating conflict in Gaza on the sidelines of the UN’s high-level week.
Israeli troops are pressing a major ground offensive to capture Gaza’s largest urban center, with AFP footage showing plumes of smoke rising over Gaza City Monday as Palestinians carrying their belongings fled southwards.
“I wish to inform you that the delegation of Israel will not participate in this meeting, as it coincides with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year,” Ambassador Danny Danon said in a separate letter to the rotating Security Council president.
“Despite Israel’s request to the Presidency and Council members to reschedule, the meeting remains set for that date — one of the most significant in the Jewish calendar, marking the start of the High Holy Days.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to address the UN General Assembly on Friday amid a slew of recognitions of a Palestinian state by Western countries. Israel has angrily denounced these big policy changes.
“It’s unfortunate that the Security Council will meet without Israel,” Danon in a video statement issued Monday.