A devastating monsoon-driven landslide has claimed the lives of at least five children after crashing into an Islamic school within a sprawling Rohingya refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district, a senior fire service official has confirmed. The Cox’s Bazar camp complex hosts more than 1 million displaced Rohingya refugees who fled persecution in neighboring Myanmar, making it one of the largest refugee settlements in the world.
Dollar Tripura, local head of Bangladesh’s Fire Service and Civil Defense, stated that the disaster struck mid-lesson, when children were gathered in their classes for the school day. Rescuers managed to pull five injured children out of the debris alive, but the official warned that the death toll is likely to rise, as teams suspect additional people remain trapped and buried under the mud and rubble.
As of Wednesday evening, search and rescue efforts were still ongoing, with crews working through the night to locate possible survivors. This latest tragedy comes just three days after separate rain-induced landslides in the same camp region killed at least eight other people, amplifying concerns about the safety of refugees living in at-risk hilly terrain.
Bangladesh’s national weather office, based in the capital Dhaka, has issued warnings for additional heavy rainfall across the region over the coming days, raising fears of more landslides. In response to the ongoing risks, local authorities have launched an urgent relocation effort to move refugees out of high-risk hilly areas that are prone to mudslides during monsoon season. More than 1,000 refugees have already been moved to safer locations, though officials report that many displaced families remain reluctant to leave their makeshift huts and small plots of land, even after repeated official warnings of the dangers.
For years, Bangladesh has hosted the bulk of the Rohingya refugee population, who fled a 2017 military crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine State that the United Nations has labeled ethnic cleansing. The Bangladeshi government has repeatedly called on the international community to support a safe repatriation process for refugees to return to their homeland in Myanmar, but years of negotiations have failed to move the process forward, leaving the repatriation initiative effectively stalled.