Armed men thought to be linked to an ISIL (ISIS)-affiliated group have raided villages in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), killing dozens of people, according to authorities and civil society groups.
The attackers also set fire to a health post during their overnight assault on Cantine, about 50km west of Beni in North Kivu province, forcing patients with confirmed and suspected Ebola infections to flee.
Fighters with the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) armed group set fire to several houses and killed civilians, Beni territorial administrator Colonel Charles Omeonga told the Reuters news agency on Friday.
Justin Paluku, head of a local civil society group, also blamed the ADF for the attack.
“So far, we have counted 33 bodies and more than 50 houses set on fire, along with various other forms of material destruction,” he told the AP news agency.
Tchetche Aliamini, another local civil society leader, confirmed the death toll to Reuters and said that most of the victims suffered gunshot wounds, while others had been burned or hacked with machetes.
The violence forced many villagers to flee to other parts of the province, where the fastest-spreading Ebola outbreak in history is raging.
Among those who fled were 180 patients from the local hospital, including suspected Ebola cases and one confirmed Ebola case, said Christian Kakule, medical director of the Kelekele Hospital Centre in Cantine.
“High-risk contacts and other individuals under monitoring have all fled,” he said. “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 there was gunfire and homes were set ablaze as close as 50 metres from the hospital.
North Kivu currently accounts for almost half of all new infections in the DRC’s Bundibugyo outbreak and is the second most affected province after the epicentre, Ituri.
North Kivu was the epicentre of three previous Ebola outbreaks, including one in 2018-2020, which until this year was the DRC’s largest and deadliest.
The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) has recorded more than 10,000 cases and 5,300 Ebola deaths across the DRC.
The ADF, which has roots in Uganda and pledged allegiance to ISIL in 2019, has long operated in the border region and routinely attacks civilians. In July 2025, it killed 66 people in eastern DRC in what the United Nations called a “bloodbath”.
About 100 other armed groups operate in the DRC, most prominently the Rwanda-backed M23, which has seized key cities in the east of the country while Ebola cases increase.
“This represents a major security failure,” Paluku, of the civil society group, told AP. “Given the number of loyalist and security forces deployed in this area, it is incomprehensible how the enemy managed to bypass their defences to kill civilians and inflict such significant material and human casualties.”
