UNITED NATIONS, United States, Sept 24, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - France will host an emergency conference on the dire humanitarian situation facing Democratic Republic of Congo in October, President Emmanuel Macron said at the UN Tuesday.

"In the Great Lakes region, the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the DRC must be respected," he said.

"We must restore hope to the population of Kivu and to the hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced there."

The meeting next month in Paris would bring together "all those who can address the humanitarian emergency and combine (their efforts) with peace initiatives" already underway, Macron added.

Rich in mineral resources, eastern DRC has been plagued by conflict for three decades.

Violence has intensified since 2021 with the resurgence of the anti-government M23 group, which the UN says is supported by neighboring Rwanda and its army, which seized the major cities of Goma in January and Bukavu in February.

Clashes since January have caused thousands of deaths and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, according to the UN.

After three months of talks in Qatar, the M23 group and Kinshasa committed to a ceasefire on July 19, following a separate peace agreement signed in Washington between the governments of DRC and Rwanda in late June.

But in recent days, renewed tensions have emerged between M23 and the Congolese army.

Observers fear an M23 offensive on Uvira, a city of 500,000 people in South Kivu facing Burundi's economic capital, Bujumbura, north of Lake Tanganyika, and still under the control of the Congolese army and pro-Kinshasa militias.