A UN report released Tuesday details a wave of violence that has swept Haiti’s rural reaches, describing gang raids on villages and alarming levels of food insecurity caused by the targeting of farmers in the country’s historic breadbasket.

Gangs are invading Haiti’s rural central region, suffocating a once peaceful area that served as the country’s food basket but that is now plagued by kidnappings, killings and rapes, according to a U.

At least 20 criminal groups active in rural Artibonite Valley, said the United Nations Human rights Office and the U.N. Integrated Office in Haiti.

Haiti's brutal gang wars have spread from the capital to key farming heartlands, displacing tens of thousands of people and having a devastating impact on access to food staples, the United Nations said in a report on Tuesday.

A hospital in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, has been evacuated by police after nearby gang violence. More than 100 patients - nearly half of them children - had to be removed from the Fontaine Hospital Center, according to its director Jose Ulysse.