Shooting in Moyale Keeps Residents Indoors at Ethiopia's Busiest Kenyan Border Crossing

Residents of Moyale told Tikvah Ethiopia that gunfire began on Wednesday evening and that they have been unable to leave their homes. A local official describes a flag planted inside a disputed boundary area.

Residents of Moyale, the town straddling Ethiopia's border with Kenya, say security has deteriorated sharply in recent days, with gunfire reported across several neighbourhoods beginning Wednesday evening. "I can't leave the house," one resident told Tikvah Ethiopia.

Moyale is not an incidental town. It is the land gateway for trade moving between Ethiopia and Kenya along the Addis Ababa–Nairobi corridor, the road that an entire generation of regional integration policy has been built around. When Moyale closes, a trade route closes with it.

A boundary, and a flag

The unrest appears bound up with the long-contested administrative boundary between the Oromia and Somali regional states, which runs through the area.

Gelma Koropcha, speaking to Tikvah Ethiopia, described a flag being raised on metalwork previously installed at a service point he places inside the Oromia boundary. His account continues that the flag was hung at the Somali regional boundary and that it is "not even possible to enter the office."

Residents described the contested stretch as a place where the two regions' territory is separated by little more than the road itself — a description that explains how an installation can be claimed by both sides at once.

Open

No federal or regional authority had issued a public account of the shooting at the time of writing, and there is no official casualty figure. Neither regional administration has commented on the flag incident or on who controls the service point in question. It is also unclear whether the Moyale crossing itself is operating, which is the question that matters most to anyone with freight on that road.

Fact.et has drawn here on residents' accounts relayed by Tikvah Ethiopia and on one named local official. These are single-source claims from an area where communications are poor and both regional administrations have an interest in the telling.

Sources: Tikvah Ethiopia, 22 October 2026, Tikvah Ethiopia, 22 October 2026