Airstrike hits aid hospital in South Sudan amid renewed fighting

On the night of February 3, a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Jonglei State, near the town of Lankien in South Sudan, was hit by an airstrike, the BBC reported. The NGO said the hospital “was hit in an air strike by the government of South Sudan forces during the night on Tuesday,” adding that an unknown number of aid workers are missing following the attack. The South Sudanese government has yet to comment.

Also on February 3, MSF said it had suffered another attack in Pieri, also in Jonglei State. The healthcare facility was looted by unknown militias, leaving it “unusable for the local community.” Jonglei State has seen an estimated 280,000 people displaced by fighting and aerial bombardments since December 2025, according to the United Nations.

Since March 2025, the fragile balance upheld by the peace agreement that ended the bloody civil war in 2018 has begun to unravel. On March 5, Vice President Riek Machar, who was President Salva Kiir’s rival during the civil war, was placed under house arrest following the detention of several of his allies, accused of overrunning an army base in the country’s north, as well as allegations that Machar was plotting to overthrow President Kiir.

On March 25, a top UN official, Nicholas Haysom, stressed that the postponement of the country’s first elections represented a major obstacle to the full implementation of the peace plan. A peaceful solution, Haysom said, can only succeed if President Salva Kiir and his rival, Riek Machar, are willing to engage “and put the interests of their people ahead of their own.”

While it remains unclear which faction was behind the attack on the French NGO’s facility, MSF stated that “the government of South Sudan armed forces are the only armed party with the capacity to perform aerial attacks in the country.” The accusation carries added weight given that in December 2025 the South Sudanese government imposed restrictions on humanitarian access in opposition-held areas of Jonglei, limiting MSF’s ability to deliver essential medical assistance.

The attack on the hospital came just days after an order issued on January 23 by the head of South Sudan’s armed forces, Gen. Paul Nang Majok, to “crush the rebellion” in the east within seven days. In Jonglei State, militias from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in Opposition (SPLA-IO) have recently seized several areas.

A 2018 peace deal ended the civil war that killed nearly 400,000 people, but it has never been fully implemented, and relations between the two leaders have grown increasingly strained amid ethnic tensions and sporadic violence. Today, the world’s youngest country is facing a devastating humanitarian crisis, with 7.7 million people experiencing severe food insecurity. The crisis is driven both by the renewed outbreak of armed clashes across the country and by worsening climatic conditions. In 2024 and 2025, South Sudan saw the displacement of more than 700,000 people due to flooding.

BBC, Maghrebi.org