Armed men kill at least 33 in raid on Ebola-hit eastern DRC

Cantine — Armed men have raided villages in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, killing at least 33 people and setting fire to a health post, in an assault that has scattered Ebola patients across a province at the heart of the country's deadliest outbreak on record, Al Jazeera reported.

The overnight attack struck Cantine, about 50km west of Beni in North Kivu province. Beni's territorial administrator, Colonel Charles Omeonga, told Reuters that fighters with the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) set fire to several houses and killed civilians. Justin Paluku, head of a local civil society group, also blamed the ADF, telling the AP news agency: "So far, we have counted 33 bodies and more than 50 houses set on fire, along with various other forms of material destruction."

A second civil society leader, Tchetche Aliamini, confirmed the toll to Reuters, saying most victims were shot, while others were burned or attacked with machetes. The death toll has not been independently verified.

The raid carries a second danger. Christian Kakule, medical director of the Kelekele Hospital Centre in Cantine, said 180 patients fled, including suspected Ebola cases and one confirmed case, after gunfire and burning homes came within 50 metres of the hospital. "Our concern is that when probable cases end up out in the open like this, they can become a source of transmission and trigger an outbreak of the disease," he said. High-risk contacts under monitoring had also fled.

North Kivu now accounts for almost half of new infections in what is already the fastest-spreading Ebola outbreak in history, with the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention recording more than 10,000 cases and 5,300 deaths across the DRC, as Wide World News has previously reported. The province was the epicentre of three earlier outbreaks, including the 2018-2020 epidemic that was, until this year, the country's largest.

The ADF, which has roots in Uganda and pledged allegiance to ISIL in 2019, routinely attacks civilians in the border region; in July 2025 it killed 66 people in what the United Nations called a "bloodbath". Around 100 other armed groups operate in the east, most prominently the Rwanda-backed M23. Paluku called the Cantine raid "a major security failure", telling AP it was "incomprehensible" how attackers bypassed the forces deployed in the area.

The immediate test for health officials is tracing the patients and contacts who fled before the virus does it for them. Whether Kinshasa can account for the security lapse Paluku describes is the next question — for now, no authority has claimed to have the attackers in custody.