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More than 30 million people, over half of them children, are in need of aid in Sudan after 20 months of war, the United Nations said Monday, calling for "unprecedented" international assistance to address the crisis.

The UN has launched a $4.2 billion call for funds, targeting 20.9 million people across Sudan from a total of 30.4 million people it said are in need.

"Sudan remains in the grip of a humanitarian crisis of staggering proportions," Edem Wosornu, from the UN's humanitarian agency OCHA, told the Security Council at UN headquarters in New York.

"Hunger and starvation are spreading because of the decisions being made each day to continue to prosecute this war, irrespective of the civilian cost," she said.

"The unprecedented scale of the needs in Sudan demands an unprecedented mobilisation of international support."

Beth Bechdol, the deputy director-general of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), echoed Wosornu's plea, urging member states to do more diplomatically and financially.

"We need your political leverage to end hostilities and to bring relief to the people of Sudan. They urgently need food, water, shelter, medication and life-saving emergency agricultural assistance today, and not tomorrow," Bechdol said.

"If we fail to act now, collectively and at scale, millions of lives are even further at risk," she added, noting the additional risks for further destabilisation of the region.

Sudan has been torn apart and pushed towards famine by the war that erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Tens of thousands of people have been killed and more than eight million internally displaced, which, in addition to the 2.7 million displaced before the war, has made Sudan the scene of the world's largest internal displacement crisis.

A further 3.3 million people have fled across Sudan's borders to escape the war, which means that more than a quarter of the country's pre-war population, estimated at around 50 million, are now uprooted.

Famine has already been declared in five areas in Sudan and is expected to take hold of five more areas by May, with 8.1 million people currently on the brink of mass starvation.

Sudan's army-aligned government has denied there is famine, while aid agencies complain that access is blocked by bureaucratic hurdles and ongoing violence.

Both the army and the RSF have been accused of using starvation as a weapon of war.

For much of the conflict, the United Nations has struggled to raise even a quarter of the funds it has targeted for its humanitarian response in the impoverished northeast African country.

Sudan has often been called the world's "forgotten" war, overshadowed by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine despite the scale of the horrors inflicted upon civilians.