• The government and M23 rebels have been fighting for months.
• The latest violence happened just five days after the two sides agreed to stop fighting.
• At least 300 people were killed last week in the village of Kishishe in North Kivu province.
• The area is still in rebel hands, so it is hard for the government to confirm the information.

Last week, the M23 rebel group killed about 300 villagers in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a government minister said on Monday.

The government and the well-known armed group M23 have been fighting for months. The latest violence happened just five days after the rebels and Congolese forces agreed to stop fighting.

The army first said that the M23 rebels killed at least 50 civilians in the village of Kishishe in the eastern province of North Kivu last week. Then, the government said that more than 100 people had died.

But at a press briefing on Monday, Paluku and a government spokesman named Patrick Muyaya gave new numbers about the deadly attack. They did this by citing information gathered by civil society and communities in the area.

“We are looking at around 300 deaths,” said the industry minister Paluku. He said the people who died were known to live in Kishishe and had nothing to do with militia groups.

Paluku, who was governor of North Kivu province from 2007 to 2019, said, “Every community has been able to record the people who died from units in Kishishe and its environs.”

“One community alone has more than 105 deaths,” he added.

The rebel group has said that it is not to blame and that the accusations are “baseless.” However, it has been said that eight civilians were killed by “stray bullets” on November 29 during fighting in the village.

Muyaya told reporters that all of the people who died were civilians, and at least 17 of them were likely children. He said that deaths were reported from a church and a hospital.

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M23 offensive

The UN’s peacekeeping mission in DR Congo has called for an investigation after the government said that a well-known armed group in the country’s troubled east killed 50 villagers.

Representatives from the US and EU said that the killings might be war crimes, and Human Rights Watch said that UN troops should be sent to protect the survivors.

The area is still in rebel hands, so it is hard for the government to confirm the information.

Muyaya said that work was being done to try to find out how many people had died.

Residents who spoke by phone to AFP said that the rebels had told them to bury the dead in mass graves.

The March 23 Movement, or M23, is a rebel group made up mostly of Congolese Tutsis that was quiet for many years.

It started fighting again in November of last year, and in June it took over the town of Bunagana, which is near the border with Uganda.

After a short time of peace, it went back on the attack in October.

Kinshasa says that M23 is getting help from its smaller neighbor Rwanda, which UN experts and US officials have also said in recent months.

Kigali disagrees with the claim and has accused Kinshasa of working with the FDLR, which is a former Rwandan Hutu rebel group that was set up in the DRC after the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi people in Rwanda.

On November 23, talks between the two countries in Luanda, the capital of Angola, led to a peace deal.

The end of the fighting was supposed to happen on November 25. It should have been followed by the M23 pulling out of the land it had taken over two days later, but this did not happen.

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