Observers blame a deadly cocktail of factors for the rising body count: a breakdown of law and order in the war-torn nation, an influx of guns and inflation in the bride price - paid in cattle.
South Sudan rejects UN allegations its security services kidnapped two prominent government critics exiled in Kenya in 2017.
After being given medication he lies fast asleep, naked and feverish, attached to a drip, his anxious mother sitting on the bed next to him.
He was speaking at a peace ceremony in the capital Juba attended by the returned rebel leader Riek Machar who’s been restored a vice president.
The new deal aims to end a civil war that erupted in the world's youngest country in December 2013 and uprooted about four million people - roughly a third of the population.
South Sudan became independent from Sudan in 2011, but civil war broke out two years later between the government led by Kiir and a rebel movement led by Machar.
South Sudan has been criticised in the past for imposing massive charges on aid groups and their workers to register them to operate in the country.
South Sudan was the world’s youngest country when it became independent from neighbouring Sudan in 2011 following decades of conflict.
South Sudan’s war has largely been fought between the forces of Kiir, a Dinka, and the SPLA-IO of former vice president Machar, a Nuer.
Rather than speaking with one voice, regional leaders have largely worked on South Sudan on a bilateral basis.
Social media accounts and a magazine interview in the names of two of the men suggested they had recently been fighting pro-Russian forces in Ukraine.
The forum would be set up urgently, leaders from the East African bloc IGAD said, without specifying when or what form it would take.
Oil-rich South Sudan has been ravaged by civil war since 2013, when President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, fired his deputy Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer.
President Salva Kiir has appointed General James Ajongo as the new army chief, said Minister of Defence Kuol Manyang Juuk.
The civil war in the oil-producing country began two years after it won independence from neighbouring Sudan.
The new order will require an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) seeking to work in South Sudan to pay $3,500, up from $600.
According to the UN, more than three years of civil war in South Sudan has forced 1.5 million people to flee into neighboring countries.
South Sudan was plunged into a sporadic civil war in 2013 when Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, fired his deputy, an ethnic Nuer.
