At least 300 people have been killed in four days of intense gun battles in the capital of South Sudan and 42,000 have fled the city, the UN said Friday.
The recent violence in Juba echoed the fighting that triggered the civil war and marks a fresh blow to last year's peace deal to end the bitter conflict that began when President Salva Kiir accused ex-rebel and now Vice President Riek Machar of plotting a coup.
"It's over 300 deaths since August 8," said World Health Organization spokesman Tarik Jasarevic. The UN however said it did not have the number of injured.
The July 8-11 violence had left "42,000 internally displaced" in the world's youngest nation, said William Spindler, the spokesman for the UN refugee agency.
"The number of refugees in neighboring countries is now 835,000," he said.
However, the International Organization for Migration said many people were returning.
AFP reports that South Sudanese security forces are preventing people from leaving the East African nation, Amnesty International said.
"The organization has received reports from two charter companies that national security service officers have ordered them not to carry South Sudanese nationals, particularly men,” Amnesty’s South Sudan researcher, Elizabeth Deng, said Thursday in an e-mailed statement. “It is absolutely critical that both parties to the conflict do not obstruct safe passage of civilians fleeing to places of refuge both inside and outside of the country.”
Thousands of South Sudanese reportedly gathered at the country’s southern border seeking to enter into Uganda, but are also being prevented from crossing, Amnesty said.
The United Nations Mission in South Sudan, UNMISS, is protecting about 33,000 people who fled the violence in the nation’s capital, Juba, Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Mon, said in an e-mailed statement.
UNMISS "reports that the situation in Juba is calm but tense with heavy" military presence, Dujarric said. “The mission reports that its peacekeepers continue to undertake limited patrols as well as strengthening security at the outer perimeter of the protection of civilian sites.”
The mission, UN agencies and funds are preparing for the temporary relocation of non-critical staff from Juba after two peacekeepers were injured in the fighting, and UN and other international non-governmental organizations’ premises were targeted by government soldiers, she said.
"The reports include allegations of a killing of at least one South Sudanese national working for an international NGO, as well as rape, including of an international NGO staff. UN staff members have also been assaulted," Dujarric said. "We continue to call for immediate, safe and unhindered access for the protection of civilians.”
"Humanitarian access to affected people has improved dramatically since Monday. But this can only be sustained if the ceasefire holds," said John McCue, IOM South Sudan Head of Operations.
Machar's sacking as vice-president in 2013 set off a cycle of retaliatory killings that split the poverty-stricken, landlocked country along ethnic lines and drove more than two million out of their homes.
The conflict has been characterized by horrific rights abuses, including gang rapes, the wholesale burning of villages and cannibalism.
According to the UN, there were some 114,000 South Sudanese refugees in neighboring countries before December 2013 but that figure has ballooned to 835,000 now.