The United States announced on July 5 a humanitarian truce between Kinshasa and the M23 rebel group.
Two children and two teenagers have been killed in a bombing in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), local sources told the AFP news agency.
The United States announced on July 5 a humanitarian truce between Kinshasa and the M23 rebel group The fighting was supposed to last until July 19, but it broke out on Friday.
A spokesman for one of the armed groups supporting the DRC forces said the fighting took place 70km northwest of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province.
By Monday, the fighting had reached the town of Bweremana, about 15km west of Goma, where the deadly bombardment struck.
Among the dead were two children from the same family, according to Innocent Mwitehofu Mumbara, a local civil society leader. The four victims were aged two, three, 16 and 18, Mumbara added.
A mother and her four-year-old child were among the injured, Bweremana police commissioner Paulin Ilunga said, adding that the shell “came from the hills where the M23 is located”.
Confirming the deaths of four people in the attack, a hospital source told AFP that five others had been admitted with serious injuries.
The DRC has been facing political instability and armed violence since 1996, with an estimated six million people killed since the start of the conflict.
Since the end of 2021, the M23, supported by units of the Rwandan army, had seized large swathes of territory in North Kivu, going so far as to almost completely encircle Goma.
According to a Human Rights Watch report, the M23 executed dozens of villagers and militia members between November 2022 and April 2023, burying them in mass graves in the village of Kishishe, North Kivu.
THE the report says The M23 has committed unlawful killings, rapes and other war crimes since late 2022, worsening the country’s dire humanitarian crisis. A total of 171 civilians were executed in the last 10 days of November, according to the UN Human Rights Office.
At the end of June, the M23 and the Rwandan army seizes several cities in the Lubero territory, in the north of North Kivu, following the collapse of the Congolese army and its auxiliary militias.
Nearly 50 soldiers were sentenced to death in the following days for “fleeing the enemy.”
