At least 21 people have been killed and more than 70 wounded in shelling at a busy market in southeastern Sudan, a doctors’ union said.
According to the Sudan Doctors Network, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were responsible for the attack in the town of Sennar on Sunday.
It came a day after Sudan’s military rejected a proposal from UN experts to send an international force to protect civilians.
Thousands of people have been killed and more than 10 million have been displaced since the civil war between the army and the RSF broke out in April last year, making it one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Several peace talks brokered by Saudi Arabia and the US have failed to end the conflict.
The RSF controls most of the capital Khartoum, much of Kordofan state and most of Darfur, where it is accused of using rape as a weapon of war and targeting the Masalit population and other non-Arab communities in a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
The army failed to capture the city of Sennar.
In June, it conquered most of the wider state of Sennarwhich analysts say is strategically important due to its location close to Ethiopia and South Sudan and its rich agricultural production.
Both sides in the conflict in Sudan – the army and the RSF – are accused of committing atrocities against civilians.
The UN has made “shocking” discoveries during a fact-finding mission that “may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity”, it said last week.
This was angrily rejected on Saturday by the Foreign Ministry, which is loyal to army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
“The Sudanese government completely rejects the recommendations of the UN mission,” the report said, calling the UN Human Rights Council, which is behind the fact-finding mission, “a political and illegal body.”
The RSF has not commented.
The RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, emerged from the Janjaweed militia accused in 2003 of genocide against non-Arab communities in Darfur.
In recent months, the organization has tried to boost its international profile and gain legitimacy as a political player by sending delegates to peace talks in Switzerland, but they have been ignored by the military.
More BBC stories about the war in Sudan:
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