Heavy rains have triggered building collapses that have killed nine people in northern Sudan, as the country reels from almost 16 months of fighting between rival security forces, a medic told AFP Tuesday.
"Nine people have died as a result of their houses collapsing," said an employee at a hospital in Abu Hamad, a small town in Sudan's Nile state, some 400 kilometres (nearly 250 miles) north of Khartoum.
"Many injured people continue to arrive at the hospital", the source added.
Each year in August, peak flow on the Nile is accompanied by heavy rains, destroying homes, wrecking infrastructure and claiming lives, both directly and indirectly through water-borne diseases.
The impact is expected to be worse this year after more than twelve months of fighting that has pushed millions of displaced people into flood zones.
"Heavy rains caused most of the houses to collapse and all the shops in the market collapsed," a witness in Abu Hamad told AFP by telephone.
Last week, a flash flood caused the deaths of five people in Port Sudan, on the Red Sea coast.
Since July 7, torrential rains and flooding have killed 32 people across the country, Sudan's federal emergency operations centre said Tuesday.
Dozens have also been injured and over 5,000 homes affected, the centre said.
According to the United Nations, heavy rain and flooding have displaced over 21,000 people since June -- mostly in areas already reeling from heavy fighting.
Aid groups have repeatedly warned that humanitarian access, already hampered by the war, will be made near-impossible in remote areas as the rainy season hits.
Sudan faces what the United Nations has called the world's worst humanitarian crisis in recent memory, as fighting between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces shows no sign of abating.
Over 10 million people have been forced from their homes, while the main battlegrounds teeter on the brink of all-out famine.
The war has already pushed the nearly half a million residents of the Zamzam camp outside the besieged Darfur city of El-Fasher into famine, a UN-backed assessment said last week.