Gunmen Kill 47, Kidnap More Than 50 in Overnight Massacre at Haiti Hill Town

Gunmen from Haiti's largest gang coalition swept into the hill town of Kenscoff on motorbikes overnight between Sunday and Monday, Aug. 23-24, killing at least 47 people, including five children, and abducting more than 50 others in one of the deadliest single attacks of Haiti's gang crisis this year, according to the United Nations Security Council. Among the dead were 22 people who had taken shelter at the Ark of the New Covenant Church, an evangelical Pentecostal congregation led by Bishop Renelus Maxime, and who were shot after gang members found them inside.

The attack, which also set fire to homes and vehicles across the farming community roughly 10 kilometers southeast of Port-au-Prince, was carried out by fighters aligned with Viv Ansanm, the coalition of armed groups that has seized broad control of the Haitian capital since 2024. A local commander who identified himself as "Izo 2," operating on behalf of the powerful gang leader Johnson André, known as Izo, later warned Haitian National Police director Vladimir Paraison that hostages would be killed if security forces moved against the gang, according to NPR.

The UN Security Council convened an emergency briefing on the massacre Friday, five days after the attack, hearing from the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Haiti, Carlos Ruiz Massieu, and the Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, Indrika Ratwatte, who told the Council that "the latest attack on Kenscoff is yet another grim reminder" of the toll gang violence is taking on civilians, according to the Council's own account of the session.

The toll, five days on

As of Friday's Security Council session and reporting through Aug. 28, the death toll stood at 47, with 22 injured and more than 50 people still being held by the gang, according to the UN account of the briefing and follow-up reporting by the Haitian Times. No hostages had been released or rescued as of that report, and police in Port-au-Prince have offered few details publicly about any rescue effort. A police spokesman, Garry Desrosiers, told reporters this week only that "we cannot talk about any plans" regarding the hostages, adding, "I'm not in a position to give you detailed information." Paraison said a police investigation would examine whether the scale of the killing reflected "complicity or negligence" among security forces stationed near Kenscoff.

Roughly 2,600 people fled Kenscoff in the days after the attack, according to displacement tracking cited by the Haitian Times and an emergency tracking bulletin published by the UN's migration agency, adding to a national displacement crisis the UN says has nearly doubled over two years. UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the killings, saying, according to NBC News' account of his statement, that "the relentless gang attacks on communities and the loss of lives underscore the alarming security conditions in Haiti."

The Security Council was also given a wider accounting of the toll gang violence has taken on Haiti this year: at least 1,408 people killed and 656 injured between April and June alone, nearly 1.5 million people internally displaced — about 12 percent of the population, half of them children — and more than 5,500 recorded incidents of gender-based violence in the first six months of 2026, roughly 30 a day. Child recruitment by armed groups rose 200 percent in 2025, the Council heard, and 2.6 million children nationwide now need humanitarian assistance.

How Kenscoff became a target

Kenscoff sits in the hills above Pétion-Ville, the upscale Port-au-Prince suburb that hosts foreign embassies and what remains of Haiti's seat of government, and controls routes linking the capital to Haiti's southern departments. Once known for market gardens and a relatively temperate climate that drew weekend visitors from the capital, the town has been contested territory for Viv Ansanm since 2025, with security forces and gangs trading control of its center in a string of raids, the most recent of which came in July.

Viv Ansanm — Haitian Creole for "living together" — is an alliance of gangs, including the 5 Segonn group blamed for organizing the Kenscoff attack, that came together in 2024 and now controls the great majority of Port-au-Prince along with expanding stretches of the surrounding countryside. Haiti has had no elected president or functioning parliament since 2021, and a transitional government has struggled to reconstitute a police force and army hollowed out by years of underfunding and gang infiltration.

Haiti's UN ambassador told the Security Council the attack demonstrated the gangs' "new capacity for violence and terror" and said the Haitian Armed Forces remained "fully mobilized on the ground" alongside a UN-backed international force, while pressing for that force to reach its full authorized strength. The Security Council last September authorized a Gang Suppression Force to succeed the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission that had been deployed since 2024; Haiti's representative said the new force is meant to reach a planned strength of 5,500 personnel, with troop commitments so far from Chad, Mongolia and Côte d'Ivoire and talks under way with Jamaica, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The UN's own reporting office in Haiti, BINUH, said this week that the force remained short of full deployment, with its patrols in the capital region so far largely routine.

The victims included the five children among the 47 confirmed dead, along with worshippers and residents who had sought refuge inside the Ark of the New Covenant Church, a congregation of roughly 500 members that also supports a network of rural churches in the area. Kenscoff's mayor, Jean Massillon, told the Associated Press that gangs burned 25 homes and killed two municipal employees, including a member of his own security detail who was his cousin. "The atrocity of this crime reminds us that we have to continue working stronger every day to bring peace to the community," Massillon said, adding that he remained "optimistic that the state will continue working to eradicate the gangs in Kenscoff."

More than 50 residents remain unaccounted for in gang custody, and researchers who track the conflict said the attack appeared designed in part to stretch the resources of police and the incoming Gang Suppression Force even thinner. María Fernanda Arocha, a researcher with the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, said gangs have targeted Kenscoff because controlling it lets them encircle Pétion-Ville and choke off one of the few overland routes still open between the capital and Haiti's south.

Reaction at the UN and in Haiti

Security Council members condemned the killings in blunt terms during Friday's session. Colombia's representative told the Council, "We cannot normalize a weekly massacre in Haiti." The United States' representative denounced what it called "savage gang attacks," saying "terrorists cannot take democracy hostage," while the United Kingdom's representative described the killings as "calculated assaults on communities." Denmark, which holds the Council presidency this month, said its members were "appalled by the abhorrent killing," and France's representative pointed to the renewal of the UN arms embargo on Haiti due in October as a tool to choke off weapons reaching the gangs — a trafficking route Russia's representative separately blamed for arming the groups behind the attack.

"We cannot normalize a weekly massacre in Haiti."

In Kenscoff itself, residents have pressed police for answers about how a raid of that scale went unchecked for hours. The Haitian Times reported that a second gang leader has since threatened a further attack on Tabarre, a Port-au-Prince neighborhood near the U.S. Embassy, underscoring fears that the violence could spread rather than subside. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have called for an independent investigation into the killings and for protection to be extended to survivors and displaced residents, many of whom fled with only what they could carry.

What happens next

No hostages had been freed as of the most recent public reporting, and Haitian police have not said whether negotiations are under way. The Security Council's own briefing made clear that the Gang Suppression Force — the successor to the Kenya-led mission that struggled for two years to make headway against better-armed gangs — remains short of the personnel and equipment needed to secure areas like Kenscoff on a lasting basis, even as UN officials warned that further delays would let the coalition consolidate its hold on the town.

Haiti's transitional authorities face a December election on top of the security crisis, raising questions about whether a vote can be held credibly in areas gangs control. The Security Council is due to revisit the arms embargo on Haiti in October, and UN officials said sustained funding and faster troop deployments for the Gang Suppression Force would determine whether Kenscoff becomes the latest entry in a long list of massacres or a turning point that draws a stronger international response. For now, families in Kenscoff wait for word of relatives still being held, and the town's residents who returned have found blackened homes and a church compound where dozens of their neighbors did not survive the night.