At least 33 civilians were killed when militants raided the village of Cantine-Aloya in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo late on Thursday, setting fire to a health post and more than 50 houses and forcing Ebola patients to flee a nearby hospital. The attackers struck at about 11pm local time, in a village roughly 50 kilometres west of Beni in North Kivu province, an area at the centre of the country’s Ebola outbreak.
Local authorities and civil society groups blamed the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an armed group recognised by Islamic State as an affiliate. Beni territorial administrator Colonel Charles Omeonga told Reuters the militants set fire to several houses and killed civilians. The death toll is provisional: civil society leader Tchetche Aliamini said 33 bodies had been recovered, most bearing gunshot wounds while others had been burned or hacked with machetes, and Omeonga said an official toll had not yet been established because heavy rain hampered army operations and investigations. The New York Times reported at least 44 dead, so the final figure may rise.
About 180 patients fled the Kelekele Hospital Centre in Cantine as the raid unfolded, among them one confirmed Ebola patient, five suspected cases and three high-risk contacts who had been under observation, the hospital’s medical director, Christian Kakule Vulembera, told Reuters. “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.”
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Ebola response teams had to halt work in the area after the raid, and warned that the disruption makes it harder to trace possible infections and control the outbreak. Africa CDC said on Sunday that the attack had disrupted Ebola care and tracing in North Kivu, with hundreds of people with confirmed or suspected infection forced to flee for safety.
North Kivu now accounts for about half of all new infections in DR Congo’s outbreak of the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which is centred on neighbouring Ituri province. Authorities have reported more than 10,700 confirmed cases and over 5,200 deaths, according to the UN humanitarian office. The World Health Organization added two new Ebola vaccines to a trial in DR Congo earlier this week as the outbreak passed 10,500 cases.
The ADF began as a Ugandan rebel movement in the 1990s and pledged allegiance to Islamic State in 2019. It has long operated in the forested border region of eastern Congo and routinely attacks civilians; in July 2025 it killed 66 people in eastern DR Congo in what the United Nations called a “bloodbath”.
Sources: Reuters, via SRN News (https://srnnews.com/islamist-militants-force-ebola-patients-to-flee-in-deadly-congo-raid/); UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (https://dailyimroz.com/news/violence-in-eastern-drc-kills-30-civilians-hampers-ebola-fight); Africa CDC (https://www.uanworld.com/story/live-cod-ebola-outbreak-2026).
