Ethiopia's army chief has publicly accused Eritrea of funding and arming rebel groups destabilising the country's north, as fresh fighting between federal forces and Tigrayan fighters raises fears of a return to full-scale civil war. Field Marshal Berhanu Jula, making his first comments on the recent escalation, said the military was responding to provocations from the Tigray front with "wisdom and restraint", while describing the newly formed "Tsimdo" rebel alliance as part of a long-standing pattern of hostile coalitions that rely on foreign backing to confront the state. Eritrea, which borders Ethiopia to the north and has long harboured concerns that landlocked Ethiopia may seek access to the Red Sea through its territory, denied the accusations.

The renewed violence erupted after seven armed groups announced a coalition — the Ethiopian Peoples' Forces Alliance for Survival — committed to removing Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government. Fighting has spread from Tigray, the mountainous northern region that was the epicentre of a devastating 2020–2022 civil war, into the neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions. Fierce clashes have been reported around Abala, a town in the highlands between Afar and Tigray, where federal forces have reportedly prevented rebel fighters from entering. The army also claimed to have killed 272 Tigrayan fighters in a counter-offensive in North Wollo, a zone of Amhara bordering Tigray, though the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) described the government's campaign as a "full-scale offensive" involving infantry, mechanised units and drones. Clashes have also been reported near Lalibela, an Amhara town internationally recognised for its UNESCO-listed rock-hewn churches.

Internet and telecommunications services provided by the state-owned Ethio Telecom have been cut across much of Tigray, with independent internet monitoring group NetBlocks confirming a widespread outage in the north of the region. A relief worker in Mekelle, Tigray's capital, described communications going dark overnight, while sources told Reuters that the TPLF itself may have ordered the blackout — reportedly to hinder government drone operations. The disruption compounds an already severe humanitarian situation: residents report that the region has faced acute cash shortages for around eight months, with people unable to access ATMs. One Mekelle resident described the city as eerily quiet, "as if a curfew had been imposed."

The fighting puts severe strain on the 2022 Pretoria Agreement, which ended a two-year war estimated to have killed some 600,000 people and pushed the region to the brink of famine. Critics argue the peace deal was undermined from the outset. Alemayehu Weldemariam, a professor of law at Indiana University, told Al Jazeera that many of the agreement's provisions were "sabotaged by the federal government itself" through restrictions on fuel, services and cash imposed on Tigray, and through a failure to establish the promised interim regional administration — leaving Tigray excluded from national elections. The UN has said it is alarmed by reports of drone strikes affecting civilians, and the United States has issued travel warnings for all three affected regions. The escalation represents the most serious challenge yet to the Pretoria Agreement and risks drawing in armed groups from across Ethiopia's ethnically diverse regions, raising the spectre of a wider conflict in an already volatile Horn of Africa.