Fighting during DR Congo army, M23 truce kills 4, including 2 children

Two children and two teenagers were killed in a bombardment in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday despite a truce between the country's army and rebels, local sources said.

A humanitarian truce between Kinshasa and the Rwanda-backed M23 was announced on July 5 by the United States and was supposed to last until July 19.

But fighting erupted on Friday morning some 70 kilometres (43 miles) northwest of the North Kivu provincial capital Goma, a spokesman for one of the armed groups backing the Congolese forces said.

By Monday, the fighting had reached the town of Bweremana around 15 kilometres west of Goma, where the deadly bombardment struck.

The dead included 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 wounded, said Bweremana police commissioner Paulin Ilunga, claiming that the shell had "come from the hills where the M23 is".

Confirming the deaths of four people in the attack, a hospital source told AFP that five more  had been admitted with serious injuries.

Since the end of 2021, the M23, supported by units of the Rwandan army, has seized vast swathes of territory in North Kivu, going so far as to almost completely encircle Goma.

At the end of June, the M23 and the Rwandan army seized several towns in 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".