Eighty percent of Malakal's 120,000 residents and most of the 35,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in and around the town have no clean drinking water, according to the UN. The town's water plant, which normally purified Nile water for Malakal's residents, had not been operational for a month, Nadia el Maaroufi, an official with the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told IRIN. "People are taking water direct from the Nile, leading to an unknown number of deaths and cases of diarrhoea," she said. "We do not know how many people are dying."