"I saw nine bodies in front of me", including several children, Dédesi Mitima, the chief of the Lac Vert neighbourhood west of the North Kivu provincial capital Goma, told AFP.

According to witness accounts that were still unclear early afternoon, "bombs" fell in the morning on the huts of displaced people on either side of the road that connects Goma to Sake, a town considered a strategic point some 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the provincial capital.

Backed by units of the Rwandan army, the M23 rebels (March 23 Movement) took up arms again in late 2021 after several years of inactivity and seized large swathes of North Kivu, coming close to encircling Goma.

The city is home to more than one million people and nearly one million displaced people, who have been arriving in successive waves since the start of the rebel offensive.

The origin of the shelling on Monday was not clearly established, but government spokesman Patrick Muyaya accused "the Rwandan army and its M23 terrorist allies" on social media.

"Horror in its most atrocious form! A bomb on civilians, deaths, children! A new war crime," he said.

According to witnesses, government forces, who had positioned themselves not far from the camp, had been shelling the rebels in the hills to the west since early morning and, according to a civil society activist, "the M23 retaliated by firing bombs indiscriminately".

Fighting intensified in early February around Sake and since then the rebellion has taken new localities in Masisi territory, northwest of Goma.

The M23 this week took control of the mining town of Rubaya, from where coltan, a strategic mineral for the electronics industry, is extracted.

DR Congo's authorities accuse Rwanda of wanting to take control of the mineral wealth of the east of the country, which borders Rwanda, something Kigali denies.

In early April, the UN mission in DR Congo (MONUSCO) described a "deteriorating security situation".

At the request of the Kinshasa authorities, who consider it ineffective, MONUSCO has begun an "accelerated" withdrawal from eastern DR Congo after 25 years of presence, starting with South Kivu province, where it officially ended its operations on Tuesday.

So far, regional diplomatic initiatives launched to try to resolve the crisis have not yielded any results.

Visiting France this week, Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi reiterated that it would only be "possible to discuss" with Rwanda once its army had "left" DR Congo.

French President Emmanuel Macron, for his part, urged Rwanda to "cease all support" for the M23 and to "withdraw its forces" from the country, also mentioning a "commitment" by Felix Tshisekedi to "put an end to the actions of the FDLR" (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), an armed group created by former Hutu leaders of the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, whose 30-year presence in eastern DR Congo has been denounced by Kigali.

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