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Warning: This piece contains details that some viewers may consider distressing

Touma hasn't eaten in days. She sits silently, her eyes glassy as she looks aimlessly across the hospital ward.

Held close, still and critically malnourished, lies her three-year-old daughter, Masajed.

Touma seems numb to the sounds of the other infants around her. "I hope she would cry," the twenty-five-year-old mother explains the observers, looking at her daughter. "She has been silent in multiple days."

The medical center is among the last operational medical facilities in the Sudanese capital, the capital city, ravaged by the civil war which has been raging since April 2023. Many have journeyed long distances to arrive here for medical treatment.

The undernourishment unit is filled with children who are insufficiently strong to combat illness, their parents by their bedside, helpless.

Cries here can't be soothed and each one causes pain.

Touma and her family were forced to flee after fighting between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary RSF reached their home about 125 miles south-west of Khartoum.

"They seized all our possessions - our money and our animals - straight out of our possession," she explains. "We escaped with just our survival."

With no money or food, Touma's children began to suffer.

She looks stunned as she recounts their old life. "Before the conflict, our home was full of goodness. We had animals, dairy and fruit. But currently we have no resources."

Humanitarian Situation

Sudan is currently experiencing one of the global worst humanitarian emergencies.

Based on the United Nations, 3 million minors under the age of five are acutely undernourished. The medical centers that are left are overwhelmed.

The facility provides treatment and basic medical care free of charge.

Nevertheless, the lifesaving medicines required by the young patients in the undernourishment ward must be paid for by their relatives.

The girl is a twin, she and her sister Manahil were brought to the hospital simultaneously. But the family could just manage to pay for medication for one child.

The mother had to make the impossible choice – she selected her other daughter.

"I hope they could both heal and develop," her grief-stricken voice cracks, "so that I could watch them walking and playing together as they used to previously.

"I simply desire them together to recover," Touma says, holding her dying daughter.

"I have no support. I have nothing. I have only faith."

Survival rates here are low. For the parents on this ward the conflict has stolen everything. They have been abandoned with no means and no means to buy the treatments that would preserve their children.

Upon departure, the physician states not one of the patients in this unit will recover.

Throughout the entirety of Khartoum, children's futures have been transformed by the civil war.

City Devastation

What started as an eruption of hostilities between loyalists supporting military leaders – military commander Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – soon engulfed the urban area.

For two years – up to last March when the military regained authority - the capital was dominated by conflict as rival fighters fought.

Khartoum, once a center of arts and commerce on the shores of the Nile River, transformed into a war zone. Tanks rolled into neighbourhoods. Fighter jets roared overhead. Civilians were caught between exchange of fire, artillery bombardments and drone strikes.

This occurs in this destroyed landscape, amid the silence of ruin, that the fragile sound of a child emerges from the rubble.

12-year-old Zaher wheels himself through the destruction, past destroyed cars, tanks, broken homes and abandoned ammunition.

"I'm coming home," he sings quietly to himself as his wheelchair rolls over shattered fragments and metal debris. "I cannot find my home. What happened to my home?"

Personal Tragedies

His words, fragile but resolute, holds both a lament for what has been lost and a subtle hope that eventually, he may finally return home.

Within a structure currently being serving as a shelter, the boy's mother the woman describes observers about what existence was like under RSF control.

"Conditions were very difficult," she explains. "We were unable to use our electricity at evening - it was as if we were criminals. We didn't light flames. We remained stationary at all at night."

She sits beside her son in a space lined with single beds.

"At any moment, whether you were resting or taking a shower, upright or seated, you encounter them [the RSF] breathing down your neck."

Many escaped the capital, but Zaher and his parent had no way to get out. To survive, they traded food items on the roads.

Then a particular day, as they worked side by side, a drone attacked.

"I looked at him and he was losing blood. There was the fluid all around," Habibah says. "I was losing consciousness. I forced myself to remain conscious because I knew if I passed out, I would lose contact with him permanently."

Zaher's legs were badly injured. After hours of agony, they made it medical care.

"I kept praying: 'Please the divine, accept my life instead of his limbs,'" she weeps.

But medical professionals could not save his legs. Both had to be amputated slightly under the joint.

"He would wake up and question: 'Why did you allow them cut my limbs?'" She looks down, her face showing remorse, "I couldn't answer."

The two Habiba and her child cry, distressed by the memory of what happened to them. It is made worse by understanding that artificial legs could provide Zaher a opportunity at his old youth, but Habiba cannot afford them.

Regarding the boy, the recollection of what happened is too difficult to talk about.

He mentions just one simple dream. "I wish I could have artificial limbs so I can play football with my companions like I did before. That's all."

Stolen Youth

Young people in the city have been deprived not only of their childhoods but of secure locations to play and experience youth.

Educational institutions, football pitches and recreation areas are now shattered, with damaged evidence of a life taken by conflict.

"It was quite pleasant here," states sixteen-year-old Ahmed looking around a ruined funfair and recreation space.