(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Up to 100,000 people have fled a week of heavy fighting in South Sudan's key northern oil state of Unity, the United Nations said Friday.
The violence is some of the worst in the country's 17-month-old civil war.
"Since the beginning of May, military activities south of Bentiu in Unity state have forced up to 100,000 people from their homes," the UN's aid chief in South Sudan, Toby Lanzer, said in a statement.
"People should never be harmed, and certainly not targeted or forced to flee from their homes," he added.
The fighting erupted in December 2013, when President Salva Kiir accused Riek Machar, whom he had sacked as vice president, of attempting a coup.
The violence, which has escalated into an ethnic conflict involving multiple armed groups, has killed tens of thousands of people in the world's youngest nation, which gained independence from Sudan in 2011.
It has also left over half of the country's 12 million people in need of aid, with 2.5 million people facing severe food insecurity, according to the UN.
Both Kiir's forces and rebels loyal to Machar have been accused of widespread atrocities, including massacres, gang rapes and recruiting child soldiers.
Lanzer said the heaviest fighting was around villages along the shifting frontlines south of Unity state capital Bentiu, home to some of the country's once lucrative oil fields.
"Civilians living in the areas of and around Guit, Ngop and Nhialdu have been particularly struck by violence and, in an attempt to avoid it, have fled," Lanzer added.
"This comes at the peak of the traditional planting season, when people need to be able to move freely and safely to be able to tend to their crops."
Over two million South Sudanese have fled the fighting, with over 520,000 of them seeking refuge in neighbouring Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya and Uganda.
Lanzer said aid workers were unable to reach those in the hardest-hit areas.
"UN agencies and their partners are urgently seeking access to areas of Unity state to assess the needs of people and to respond to them," he said, pleading with both sides to allow in aid based on the principles of "humanity, impartiality and neutrality."
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