A series of strikes blamed on the Sudanese army in the southern town of Lagawa killed at least 15 people on Monday, a medical source said, while rival paramilitary forces mounted an offensive near the Ethiopian border.
Sudan's southern Kordofan region is currently the fiercest battlefield in the three-year war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who hold West Kordofan state where Lagawa lies.
"Fifteen bodies and 23 wounded people arrived in the hospital from three neighbourhoods," a medical source in the city told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity for their safety.
The RSF accused the army of carrying out the attack, calling it part of the military's "systematic shelling of hospitals, markets and residential neighbourhoods in the cities of Kordofan and Darfur, using drones".
Both sides have been regularly accused of war crimes, including indiscriminate shelling and targeting civilians.
Across the country, the war has killed tens of thousands of people and left some 11 million displaced, creating the world's largest hunger and displacement crises.
Kordofan is a vast region that connects RSF strongholds in the western Darfur region with the army-controlled east.
Near-daily drone strikes have killed dozens at a time across the region, where the army has sought to stem an RSF advance, pushing them back towards Darfur and away from the capital Khartoum.
On Friday, an army drone strike ripped through a hospital in East Darfur state capital El-Daein, the region's gateway, killing at least 64 people.
Last week, another blamed on the RSF on Darfur's western border town of Tine killed 17 people in Chad, in the latest spillover of the conflict.
- Ethiopian border -
On the other side of Africa's third-largest country, the RSF mounted an offensive on army territory along Sudan's eastern border with Ethiopia.
Control over Sudan's southeastern Blue Nile State, bordering both Ethiopia and South Sudan, is split between the army and the RSF's allies, a faction of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu.
The eastern front has for months seen intermittent clashes as paramilitary troops inched north from the SPLM-N's southern strongholds.
Two sources, one from the army and the other from the RSF, told AFP fierce battles broke out Sunday just south of the border town of Al-Kurmuk, the army's key position in the area.
The RSF source and an SPLM-N statement said the joint offensive captured the area of Gurt, just south of Al-Kurmuk.
"Our forces are continuing their advance on Al-Kurmuk," the RSF source said.
From its foothold in the southern Blue Nile, a thin strip of land jutting south between Ethiopia and South Sudan, the SPLM-N maintains reported supply lines from both countries, building on decades-old links.
This month, Sudan's army said drone attacks had been launched "from inside Ethiopian territory", in the first accusation of Ethiopian involvement in the war.
Ethiopia has separately denied accusations it is harbouring RSF camps.
Just across the border from the SPLM-N's regional base of Yabus, satellite imagery analysed by AFP shows significant development in Ethiopia's Asosa airport -- which previously served as a drone base.
The RSF last year brought thousands of fighters into Ethiopia, an RSF source and an army source told AFP.
