Congolese rebels say they have “taken” the key city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The leader of a rebel alliance that includes the M23 group reiterated on Sunday that government forces had until 3am to surrender their weapons.

It comes after 13 soldiers serving with peacekeeping forces in the DRC were killed in clashes with the rebels, United Nations officials said.

Congolese rebels and allied Rwandan forces entered the key eastern city of Goma on Sunday and the airport is no longer in use, according to the DRC’s top UN official.

“M23 and Rwandan forces penetrated Munigi quarter in the outskirts of Goma city, causing mass panic and flight amongst the population,” said the UN’s special representative in the DRC, Bintu Keita, to an emergency UN meeting on Sunday.

The strategic city of Goma has a population of about two million people and is a regional hub for security and humanitarian efforts.

Eyewitness: Sky News team in DRC attacked as civilians flee

The M23 is mainly made up of ethnic Tutsis who broke away from the Congolese army more than a decade ago.

It’s one of about 100 armed groups that have been vying for a foothold in the mineral-rich region, where a long-running conflict has created one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises.

In recent weeks, it has made significant territorial gains.

The DRC has accused neighbouring Rwanda of fuelling the M23 rebellion and has now severed diplomatic ties with it.

Rwanda has denied the claims but last year admitted it has troops and missile systems in eastern Congo to safeguard its security, pointing to a build-up of Congolese forces near the border.

“Rwanda is trying to get in by all means, but we are holding firm,” a Congolese military source told the Reuters news agency on Sunday.

“It is war, there are losses everywhere… the population must remain calm, we are fighting,” they added.

The DRC has recalled its diplomats from Rwanda and asked Rwandan authorities to cease diplomatic and consular activities in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa.

A UN Security Council meeting to discuss the escalating violence was scheduled for Monday but was brought forward to Sunday.

During that meeting, France and the UK pressured Rwanda over its role in the conflict.

France called for Rwanda to withdraw its troops from Congo territory, while Britain called for an end to attacks on peacekeepers by M23 rebels receiving support from Rwanda.

It comes after a Congolese military governor was killed while on the frontline during a M23 offensive on Friday.

On Saturday, the Congolese army said it foiled an M23 offensive towards Goma with the help of its allied forces, including UN troops and soldiers from the Southern African Development Community Mission, also known as SAMIDRC.

The burning wreckage of a white armoured fighting vehicle carrying UN markings could be seen on a road between Goma and Sake.

South Africa said nine of its peacekeepers had been killed amid the surge in fighting during the last few days.

Three Malawians and a Uruguayan were also killed, the UN said.

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Decades of conflicts in the eastern DRC between rival armed groups over land and resources, and attacks on civilians, have killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced more than seven million.

Militias also include the Cooperative for the Development of the Congo (CODECO) and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF).

The UN peacekeeping force entered the DRC more than two decades ago and has around 14,000 soldiers on the ground.

Hundreds of displaced Congolese marched down a sloping road in northeast Goma with their lives on their backs.

Mothers with mattresses strapped to them dragged their toddlers alongside and trucks brimmed with bodies and belongings.

Many of them have been displaced more than once, as the violent insurgency waged by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels against the Congolese army spread furiously in 2024.

Read more: At least 13 peacekeepers killed in DRC

It reached new heights in recent weeks as they seized control of large swathes of territory in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and now, are advancing on the regional capital Goma.

The humanitarian hub is marked for capture by M23 with dozens of diplomats and non-essential United Nations (UN) staff evacuated by planes, cars and ferries.

As they leave, 250,000 of the most vulnerable Congolese pour into the city for safety.

We watched the movement near Goma’s Kihisi roundabout as hordes of civilians walked in the middle of the road with experience and urgency.

As we stopped to mark their plight, a small crowd stopped to stare at us.

Reports were circling that Rwandan troops had crossed the border into Goma just 5km from where we were standing – an invasion later confirmed by the UN top official in the DRC, Bintu Keita.

As we pressed record, a man with rageful red eyes pointed at me and yelled violently. We were attacked as we tried to escape.

Our colleague translated the intent fuelling the mob once we got to safety – they thought I was Rwandan.

That frenzy gives a small glimpse into the communal-level tribal hostility that has fuelled this 30-year conflict – a hangover from the notoriously violent Rwandan genocide.

The panicked civil unrest in that neighbourhood has not quelled in the hours since news spread of M23 moving in.

UN staff still in Goma have been told to stay indoors and there is increasing concern for civilians here as evidence looms of M23 atrocities in areas of their control.

“We know that M23 has been using the local population to transport their ammunition, like in [recently captured] Minova, and this is not the first time,” one aid worker told us on condition of anonymity.

We spoke to an M23 spokesman Manzi Ngaramble from our hotel in Goma and he confirmed that they are moving in to capture the city to “protect the people”.

“I cannot tell you how soon M23 will capture Goma but I can tell you this: Goma will never be the same again.”

When M23 previously captured Goma in 2012, peace was quickly brokered and the rebels retreated.

Now, Rwandan involvement has made this a regional, diplomatic crisis.

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A UN security council meeting due to be held on Monday was expedited to Sunday – echoing calls for de-escalation and protection of civilians as Goma hangs in the balance.

Troops from the United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) – the UN’s biggest peacekeeping mission – have been told to pull into the city and lock in place, after days of fighting on Goma’s outskirts led to at least 13 peacekeepers killed and 50 injured.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says he is “deeply concerned by the escalation of violence”, calling on the Rwandan Defence Forces to stop supporting M23 and to withdraw from the territory of the DRC.

As diplomats and humanitarians scramble to neutralise an explosion that is decades in the making, Goma’s future looks dark.

The hundreds of thousands of civilians who sought safety here are caught in a rabid frenzy of fear, rage and uncertainty.

There are few who can say they’ve seen the inside of hell, but Albrecht Weinberg is one of them.

From the safety of his living room, the 99-year-old describes how, as a teenager, he survived three concentration camps including the Nazi’s biggest extermination centre, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“Jews were only for the gas chamber. You worked until you could work no more. Then you went to the chimney,” he explains in a soft Brooklyn twang he picked up after years of living in New York.

Born into a Jewish family of five in the East Frisia region of Germany, Albrecht was a teenager when the Nazis first sent him to do forced labour in 1939.

He was moved to various places in the next few years until, in April 1943, he and his sister were loaded on to a wagon to Auschwitz.

The Third Reich was accelerating its extermination of Jews as part of its “Final Solution” which would see more than six million killed in the Holocaust.

Albrecht had already been separated from his parents, who had been immediately sent to gas chambers.

Now, he was being unloaded at a place where they, and ultimately more than a million other people, were murdered.

Albrecht remembers that around 950 men, women, children and the elderly were on the train but he had no clue what Auschwitz was.

“I’d never seen a prisoner in a striped uniform and cap,” he says.

As the train doors opened, he remembers soldiers shouting, “Out! Out!” in German.

Terrified, exhausted and dehydrated after days on the train, people rushed out, stepping over one another.

The group was then forced to march in front of one of the commanders so they could be selected.

Some would be sent to work, the rest to their deaths.

“He sorted us like big and small potatoes,” Albrecht tells me, “[If] he thought maybe that you could do a day’s work, he gave you a sign that you should go to the right and the others had to go to the left.”

Albrecht was one of around 250 chosen to be kept alive so that they could work.

He was sent to Auschwitz III (Monowitz) camp where by day he had to do backbreaking labour, laying cables in the freezing weather.

By night he had to sleep in a shared bunk in cramped, cold wooden huts, riddled with disease and with little sanitation.

This is how he spent almost two years.

“They came and they beat the daylights out of you and then you had to get outside. You can’t stay alive very long and do that kind of work with that little bit of food that you got,” he says explaining what his days were like.

In the camp, he met his older brother Dieter, who had been sent there before him.

The detainees weren’t seen as humans, he says they were reduced to less than animals.

Rolling up his sleeve, Albrecht shows me the now-faded grey tattoo scrawled onto his skin by the Nazis when he arrived.

“1-16-9-27: that was my name, my number, that was everything,” he says, lightly tapping his arm.

He remembers the SS guards would inspect them; if they looked too skinny, had sores or were too weak, they were executed.

“He wrote your number down, the next day you went to the chimney.”

Albrecht explains, quietly: “People died, that was their policy. Over a million people got burned.”

Somehow though, Albrecht managed to survive until January 1945 when the guards told him and a group of others they were leaving.

As Soviet troops closed in, the Nazis forced thousands of Auschwitz detainees on so-called “death marches”, moving people they thought could still work to other areas.

Albrecht was among them and remembers seeing starving and sick people die on the route.

Wearing thin clothes and ill-fitting wooden clogs, the detainees marched for miles.

Anyone who stopped or fainted was shot or beaten to death.

After the march, Albrecht was forced to work in a factory making rockets and bombs before finally being sent to Bergen-Belsen camp in northern Germany.

Years of forced labour, beatings, malnutrition and trauma meant by this time he was dying.

He remembers lying on the ground among a sea of corpses, too exhausted to go on.

That’s where he was when British forces arrived and liberated the camp.

“I must have moved my arm or something. I was 90% a dead man,” he says as he describes the scene that greeted the soldiers.

Albrecht says the Bergen-Belsen camp had become a “cemetery”.

“There were thousands of dead people lying on top of the ground. They were not buried, some of them were decomposing. The smell was awful,” he says.

After being worked as a slave and then left to die like an animal, Albrecht was finally free.

After the war, he was reunited with his brother and sister who also managed to survive Auschwitz.

He later relocated to America, only returning to Germany in 2011.

Albrecht will be at home as the world gathers to remember the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

He has only returned to the camp once – “once was enough,” he says.

Instead, he is one of several survivors whose memories are being broadcast online as part of a project by the Jewish Claims Conference to mark the anniversary.

In total, around 41 members of Albrecht’s family were murdered by the Nazis.

He says he “cannot forgive” Germany.

He knows that younger generations are not responsible for the crimes of their grandparents, but he’s also deeply concerned about ongoing antisemitism.

Last year, someone knocked over the gravestones in the Jewish Cemetery in Leer where he lives.

Albrecht was so terrified he couldn’t go out.

He says he thought it was a “second Holocaust”.

In March, he will celebrate his 100th birthday.

He doesn’t know for how much longer Auschwitz survivors will be able to tell their stories and he’s worried the world is already forgetting the horrors of the Holocaust.

For this extraordinary man, a survivor of indescribable trauma and a witness to some of the darkest acts in history, there is no peace.

“How can I forget when I think about my family, my mother, my father, my grandma? Every day when I wash myself, I see my number,” Albrecht says.

“How can I forget?”