The South Sudanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced, on Tuesday, that the two parties to the conflict in Sudan had agreed, during a call with President Salva Kiir, to a seven-day armistice, starting on May 4, which raises hopes for an end to weeks of fighting.

The ministry said in a statement that the Sudanese army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the commander of the Rapid Support Forces, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, "agreed in principle to a truce for a period of seven days, from May 4 to 11."

She added that they "gave their consent ... to appoint representatives for peace negotiations to be held in the place of their choosing."

The two warring parties did not honor any of the previous truces.
The fighting that began on April 15 killed more than 500 people, most of them in Khartoum and Darfur (west), and injured thousands, according to an official toll that observers confirm is less than the reality.

And the United Nations considered that the conflict had plunged the country, one of the poorest countries in the world, into a "disaster in the fullest sense of the word."

President Salva Kiir is working on the initiative of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) for East Africa, of which Sudan is a member, along with Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Somalia and South Sudan.