‘Despite deadly attacks .. Ebola response activities are continuing,’ the World Health Organization said on Sunday.

Health authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have resumed efforts to fight a major Ebola outbreak in eastern Beni region after a brief suspension following clashes.

“Despite deadly attacks .. Ebola response activities are continuing,” the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Sunday.

Despite deadly attacks on Friday in the town of Beni, #DRC, Ebola response activities are continuing.

Operations were on-going but limited in Beni on Saturday.

By Sunday, all activities have re-launched, including #Ebola vaccination pic.twitter.com/64yMFsat6M — World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) November 18, 2018

Health Minister Oly Ilunga Kalenga had announced the suspension of operations on Saturday, a day after clashes broke out a few a “few metres” away from a local emergency centre and the hotels of several responses teams in Beni, North Kivu province.

Peacekeepers from the United Nations‘ mission in the country (MONUSCO) repelled an offensive by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militia in the city’s northern Boikene neighbourhood late on Friday.

Seven Malawian and one Tanzanian peacekeeper were killed in the attack.

The United States joins the UN Security Council in condemning the killing of one Tanzanian and seven Malawian @MONUSCO peacekeepers. The Council sends our deepest condolences to the families of those killed and the authorities and people of Malawi, Tanzania, the DRC, and the UN. pic.twitter.com/Wpp8MyP8xd — U.S. Mission to the UN (@USUN) November 16, 2018

Also on Saturday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said 16 of its staff members had been temporarily evacuated to Goma for psychological care after a shell hit the building they were staying in.

Michel Yao, the WHO’s coordinator for Ebola response operations in Beni, told the AFP news agency that no one was wounded, adding that it was not known whether the shell came from the ADF or MONUSCO forces.

“WHO will continue to work side-by-side with the ministry and our partners to bring this Ebola outbreak to an end,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.

“We honour the memory of those who have died battling this outbreak, and deplore the continuing threats on the security of those still working to end it,” he added.

United Nations also resumed activities, including vaccination, the UN health agency said in a statement.

The latest Ebola outbreak, the country’s 10th, has caused 166 confirmed and 47 probable deaths, mostly in the mineral-rich North Kivu and Ituri provinces that have been the epicentre of interethnic and militia violence for decades.

Worst outbreak

According to the WHO, a total of 358 confirmed and probable cases have been reported in the country.

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The figure exceeds the 318 cases documented in 1976, when the virus was first identified in Yambuku, in the Equateur province.

“No other epidemic in the world has been as complex as the one we are currently experiencing,” Oly Ilunga said last week, adding that the teams responding to the outbreak are attacked on average three or four times a week, in an unprecedented level of violence compared with the country’s nine previous outbreaks.

“Since their arrival in the region, the response teams have faced threats, physical assaults, repeated destruction of their equipment and kidnapping,” Oly Ilunga.

On Saturday, a ceremony was held for the peacekeepers who were killed in the previous night’s attack.

Fifteen other peacekeepers were killed in an ADF assault on a MONUSCO base in Beni in December 2017.

The armed group was formed in neighbouring Uganda in the 1990s. Forced out of Uganda, it operates in the border area in the DRC’s North Kivu province.

In Beni, the ADF has a brutal reputation. It is blamed for hundreds of civilian deaths over the past three years, as well as mass rape and child soldier recruitment.