A devastating landslide has claimed the lives of eight people, among them seven student girls, after it struck a girls’ Islamic study school at the world’s largest Rohingya refugee settlement in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, compounding a growing humanitarian crisis fueled by relentless seasonal monsoon rains.
The disaster unfolded on Wednesday afternoon, when a cascade of mud and debris buried the makeshift school hut, triggering immediate, frantic search and rescue operations led by local relief authorities. As of the latest official updates, rescue teams have managed to extract 13 people trapped beneath the mudslide, eight of whom could not be revived after being pulled from the debris. Among the fatalities are seven students between the ages of 7 and 12 and one female teacher, while five other injured children have been transported to local medical facilities for urgent care. The total number of people who were inside the school at the time of the landslide remains unconfirmed, local officials confirmed.
This landslide is just the latest in a string of rain-triggered disasters that have shaken the Cox’s Bazar region since Sunday, when this year’s monsoon season intensified to bring record levels of rainfall to the coastal district. Prior to the school disaster, official data already recorded at least eight additional Rohingya refugee deaths from separate landslides across the settlement, five of which were children.
Cox’s Bazar is currently home to more than 1 million Rohingya refugees, the vast majority of whom fled a brutal military crackdown in their native Myanmar in 2017 that left thousands of Rohingya dead and forced more than 700,000 to cross the border into Bangladesh. As a stateless ethnic Muslim minority in majority-Buddhist Myanmar, Rohingya people have long been denied full citizenship and basic rights in their home country, leaving them dependent on humanitarian aid in the overcrowded Bangladesh camps. Most refugees live in flimsy, makeshift homes constructed from tarpaulin and bamboo, many of which are built on precarious steep hillsides that are extremely vulnerable to mudslides during heavy monsoon rains.
Local disaster management authorities have warned that the risk of further catastrophe remains high, with additional heavy rainfall forecast across the region in the coming days. Officials have already issued urgent warnings for impending landslides and flash floods, and have begun moving high-risk families out of vulnerable slope-side settlements to safer emergency shelters.