Besides Goma, the rebels also seized Sake, a strategic town on the way to South Kivu province and its capital Bukavu.
The powderkeg region was the cradle of two wars that shook DR Congo between 1996 and 1997, and then again from 1998 to 2003, with Rwanda and Uganda playing active roles.
The UN has issued damning report accusing Rwanda, and to a lesser extent Uganda, of backing the rebels. Both countries deny the allegations.
The region is home to a complex web of Congolese and foreign rebel groups and militias, and the DR Congo and Rwanda have long traded accusations of bankrolling or arming one or more of these groups.
Adding to the instability in the region, the Rwandan army claimed Tuesday that ethnic Hutu extremists based in eastern DR Congo crossed into Rwanda and attacked its forces along the border.
Army spokesman Joseph Nzabamwita said Rwandan soldiers repelled around 100 of the militiamen from the villages of Cyanzarwe and Bugeshi which he said they had attacked around dawn.
Calling themselves the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), these fighters belong to a Hutu rebel group that fled Rwanda into DR Congo after minority Tutsi leader Paul Kagame’s forces ended the 1994 genocide there.
They are held chiefly responsible for the bloodbath — in which at least 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered — and remain opposed to Kagame’s regime.
The FDLR, believed to have between 3,000 and 4,400 members, is the most powerful rebel force in the region, according to the United Nations.
Kagame’s government accuses Kinshasa of backing the FDLR, while the DR Congo accuses Rwanda of backing the M23.
The M23 was founded by former fighters in a rebel group whose members were integrated into the regular DR Congo army under a 2009 peace deal they claim was never fully implemented.
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