"The attack occurred as worshippers were leaving the mosque" after Friday noon prayers, said the Emergency Lawyers, who have been documenting human rights abuses during the 19-month war between Sudan's regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

The local resistance committee, one of hundreds of volunteer groups across Sudan delivering frontline aid during the war, confirmed the death toll and said "a number of wounded" had also been transported for treatment.

The attack was "part of a series of arbitrary military assaults that do not discriminate between civilians and military targets," the lawyers said in a statement, calling the strike a "crime against humanity and a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law".

Both the army and the RSF have been accused of deliberately targeting civilians and indiscriminately shelling residential areas.

Friday's attack occurred on a mosque in Khartoum North, also known as Bahri, which has been under near-total control of the RSF since the war began in April 2023.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the war and more than eight million internally uprooted in what the United Nations calls the world's largest displacement crisis, with another three million having fled abroad.