Sudan reopens famine camps to shelter thousands of Ethiopian refugees
UN official says over 10,000 Ethiopians have fled the fighting in Ethiopia, while hundreds more are waiting to cross a river in the border zone between the two countries.
Volunteers gather to donate blood for the injured members of Ethiopia's National Defense Forces (ENDF) fighting against Tigray's special forces on the border between Amhara and Tigray, at the stadium in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia November 12, 2020.
About 11,000 people have crossed from Ethiopia to Sudan fleeing the conflict in their home country and an estimated 50 percent of them are children, a UN refugee agency official has said.
"They are coming with very, very little possessions and while most of them have actually come in in a healthy condition, we have had information on some who have been injured," UNHCR representative Axel Bisschop told reporters in a virtual briefing on Thursday.
The agency had built a response plan for about 20,000 people, Bisschop said.
About 7,000 of those crossing have arrived at Hamdayat in Sudan's Kassala state, with another 4,000 arriving at Luqdi in al-Qadarif state.
Most of them are Tigrayan and some 45 percent of them are female, said Bisschop.
One photograph of a border crossing point showed about four boats ferrying people across a river, he said.
READ MORE: Reports of hundreds dead in Ethiopia's bombardment of Tigray region
1980s famine camps reopen
Sudan said it would shelter thousands of Ethiopians fleeing fighting, streaming across the border on foot, by bike and by boat, in a reopened 1980s camp for victims of a historic famine.
Exhausted Ethiopian refugees, mostly women, youths and children, arrived on foot or by bicycle and motorised rickshaw, said a correspondent for AFP in the Hamdait border area of Sudan's e astern Kassala state.
Sudan has reopened the Um Raquba refugee camp that hosted thousands of Ethiopians from 1983-84 amid the country's worst famine of the century, Gadaref state governor Ali Mohammad told the state-run Suna news agency.
"To accommodate the wave of refugees coming from Ethiopia, we have reopened the Um Raquba camp, built in the 1980s and closed in 2000," he said.
"We have set up an administration in the camp to be able to receive them."
Hundreds have died since Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, last year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, sent troops and warplanes into Tigray last week after a months-long feud with the Tigray People's Liberation Front.
The UN's humanitarian affairs office warned that lack of access meant "food, health and other emergency supplies have no way to make it into the region" and voiced "increasing concern for the protection of civilians against hostilities".
READ MORE: Is Ethiopia headed for a protracted war?
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