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Caution: This piece includes details that some viewers may find distressing

The mother hasn't eaten in several days. She remains quiet, her gaze glassy as she looks without focus across the medical facility.

Held close, still and critically undernourished, lies her three-year child, the little girl.

She seems unresponsive to the cries of the remaining young children around her. "I hope she would cry," the 25-year-old mother tells us, 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, Khartoum, devastated by the internal conflict which has been ongoing since April 2023. Numerous families have journeyed hours to get here for specialist care.

The malnutrition unit is occupied with children who are too weak to combat disease, their mothers by their side, helpless.

Cries here cannot be comforted and every sound causes pain.

Touma and her family were compelled to escape after hostilities between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces reached their home about 200km south-west of the capital.

"They seized everything we owned - our money and our livestock - directly out of our hands," she says. "We escaped with only our survival."

Having no funds or nourishment, Touma's children began to deteriorate.

She appears stunned as she recounts their previous existence. "In the past, our home was filled with goodness. We had animals, dairy and fruit. But now we have nothing."

Crisis Emergency

Sudan is currently facing one of the world's worst relief emergencies.

According to the UN, 3 million children under the age five are severely malnourished. The hospitals that are left are overloaded.

Bashaer Hospital offers care and essential treatment without cost.

However, the life-preserving drugs required by the young patients in the undernourishment unit must be paid for by their relatives.

Masajed is a sister, she and her sister her sibling were brought to the hospital together. But the household could just manage to pay for medication for a single child.

Touma had to face the impossible choice – she chose her other daughter.

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

"I simply desire them both to get better," Touma says, cradling her failing child.

"I am alone. I have no resources. I have only faith."

Survival rates here are minimal. For the families on this unit the conflict has stolen all they had. They have been abandoned with no means and no ability to purchase the medicines that would preserve their children.

As we leave, the doctor says none of the children in this unit will survive.

Across the entirety of the capital, children's lives have been rewritten by the internal conflict.

Urban Destruction

What began as an eruption of fighting between forces supporting military leaders – army chief the general and RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo – soon consumed the urban area.

For two years – up to last March when the military retook authority - the city was dominated by war as opposing fighters fought.

The city, previously a hub of arts and business on the banks of the River Nile, transformed into a battlefield. Armored vehicles moved into neighbourhoods. Fighter jets roared overhead. Civilians were trapped between exchange of fire, artillery bombardments and drone strikes.

This occurs in this destroyed environment, within the silence of ruin, that the fragile voice of a young person rises from the debris.

12-year-old Zaher wheels himself through the destruction, beyond destroyed cars, military vehicles, damaged homes and abandoned ammunition.

"I'm coming home," he sings softly to himself as his wheelchair rolls over broken glass and metal debris. "I can no longer see my house. Where's my residence?"

Individual Stories

His voice, fragile but determined, holds both a sorrow for what has been destroyed and a subtle hope that eventually, he may finally go home.

In a building now being used as a refuge, Zaher's parent Habibah describes me about what life was like under paramilitary control.

"The situation were extremely challenging," she says. "We couldn't use our lights at night - it seemed like we were criminals. We avoided making flames. We remained stationary whatsoever at night."

She sits beside her son in a space lined with sleeping arrangements.

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

Numerous residents fled the city, but the boy and his parent had no means to get out. To persist, they traded food items on the roads.

Subsequently one morning, as they worked side by side, a drone struck.

"I looked at him and he was bleeding. There was the fluid everywhere," Habibah recalls. "I began losing awareness. I compelled myself to stay awake because I knew if I fainted, I would lose contact with him forever."

Zaher's limbs were severely damaged. After hours of pain, they managed to reach medical care.

"I kept asking: 'I beg the divine, take my existence in place of his legs,'" she weeps.

But medical professionals could not preserve his lower limbs. The two had to be removed slightly under the knee.

"Upon awakening and question: 'Why did you let them cut my legs?'" She looks down, her expression showing regret, "I had no response."

The two the mother and her child cry, tormented by the recollection of what occurred to them. The situation deteriorates by knowing that artificial legs could provide the boy a opportunity at his old childhood, but Habiba cannot pay for them.

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

He mentions just one simple dream. "I wish I could have prosthetic legs so I can participate in soccer with my companions like I did before. That's all."

Lost Youth

Children in Khartoum have been robbed not only of their childhoods but of secure places to enjoy and be young.

Schools, sports fields and playgrounds are now shattered, with broken reminders of a life stolen by war.

"Previously quite pleasant here," states sixteen-year-old the teenager looking around a ruined funfair and playground.