After a brief period of relative calm following the formation of the transitional government and the initial deployment of the Kenyan security mission, gang networks launched a new offensive in October 2024 that demonstrated the fragility of any security improvements and the continued dominance of criminal organizations in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas. The October offensive brought fresh displacement, killings, and destruction to communities that had barely begun to recover from the February-May offensive.
The pattern that emerged through 2024 — major gang offensive, some international response, brief lull, new offensive — reflected the fundamental mismatch between the scale of criminal military capacity and the resources committed to addressing it. Each lull was followed by renewed violence because the underlying conditions that produced gang dominance — impunity, weapons flows, political-criminal connections, and inadequate security forces — had not been meaningfully changed.
Communities in Pétion-Ville and other previously relatively secure neighborhoods experienced gang attacks during the October offensive that would have been unimaginable just a year or two earlier. The progressive expansion of gang activity into areas that had maintained security through social and economic advantages was a marker of how far the crisis had progressed.
The transitional government condemned the attacks and called for accelerated deployment and funding of the international security mission. The Kenyan mission, operating with fewer than 1,000 personnel at this point, could not be everywhere simultaneously and was forced to make difficult choices about which areas to prioritize for joint operations with Haitian police. The gap between mission capacity and security need remained dangerously wide.