The October 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel, and the subsequent retaliation by Israel, have transfixed global attention. And although there’s no shortage of extreme positions, the bulk of that attention has rightly taken the form of horror at the suffering and death of civilians, especially children, caught in the crossfire.

Alongside the attention, many international organisations, from the UN agencies operating in the conflict zone to regional and Western governments, and even to Israel itself, have put a great deal of effort to succour these unlucky victims. More than a hundred trucks packed with relief food, medical supplies and other such items now cross into Gaza from Egypt every day.

This is all admirable and should continue, until the conflict abates and the guns are silenced, hopefully soon, and hopefully forever.

But the world shouldn’t keep its focus there to the exclusion of everything else. For, despite all appearances, the crisis in Gaza, just like the Ukraine situation before it and alongside it, are hardly the only human suffering and innocent deaths in the world that are worthy of attention and help.

Some of the worst are unfolding in Africa right now, as you read this article. None of them have commanded nearly as much attention at any time, nor drawn nearly as much ire and help from the international community. But they should. Two, in particular, arguably deserve similar levels of engagement as the Gaza crisis.

The first of these is happening in Sudan. As of October, the war there, which started in April following a failed democratic transition, had killed 9,000 people and injured more than 10,000. It has displaced over 6 million people, over half of whom are children. Of the displaced, more than 1.2 million have fled the country. For context, the entire population of Gaza is just over 2 million.

Things are so bad in Sudan that UNICEF, which has been crying itself hoarse about the children of Gaza, considers the Sudan situation to constitute the “largest child displacement crisis in the world.” Such labels have become so common in reference to humanitarian crises in Africa, they are almost meaningless.

Some of the more extreme terms that have been bandied around to pillory Israel’s actions in Gaza, like genocide and ethnic cleansing, would be much more justifiably used to describe what’s happening in Sudan. In the Darfur region, Arab militias have been systematically killing members of the Masalit community, just as they did during the last genocide there, for which former president Omar al Bashir got indicted by the International Criminal Court.

What makes the situation in Sudan even more unfortunate is that the war there is much less justified than the one between Israel and Hamas. Whatever activists may say about Israel’s retaliation in Gaza, there is no denying that it was provoked and is, in principle, necessary.

The war in Sudan is much more mundane; the only thing that’s at stake is the pride of two selfish men.

And while Gaza’s call for aid has been answered so generously that the only bottleneck now is the inspection of the trucks carrying it, the international community has only funded an exiguous third of the requested humanitarian aid for the Sudanese people, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). It is something, sure. But it’s pathetic.