Officials called it the deadliest in a spate of incidents related to a boundary dispute since 2021.
Armed young men from South Sudan's Warrap State carried out the raids into the neighboring Abyei region on Saturday (January 27), Bulis Koch, the information minister for Abyei, said on Monday (January 29).
Abyei is an oil-rich area that is jointly administered by South Sudan and Sudan, which have both staked claims to it.
More than 60 people were wounded, Koch told Reuters. He said the government had imposed a curfew to manage residents' fear.
Koch added that hundreds of displaced civilians had sought shelter at a U.N. base.
A Ghanaian peacekeeper and a Pakistani peacekeeper from a United Nations force were killed on consecutive days, the U.N. Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA) announced.
Warrap State's information minister said his government would conduct an investigation jointly with the Abyei administration.
There have been repeated clashes in Abyei between rival factions of the Dinka ethnic group related to a dispute over the location of an administrative boundary where significant tax revenue is collected from cross-border trade.
Civil war in South Sudan erupted soon after the country won independence from Sudan. It was fought largely along ethnic lines between Dinkas and Nuers, and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths between 2013 and 2018.
Since then, routine clashes among a patchwork of armed groups have continued to kill and displace large numbers of civilians.
