Schools were buried under mud

“Mother, my back hurts so much.” Those were the first words 15-year-old Rozia Bibi uttered after rescuers pulled her from beneath a mound of mud and debris. Terrified and in severe pain, she threw her arms around her mother, Hazera Khatun. Moments earlier, an entire hillside had collapsed onto the madrasa, an Islamic religious school she attended. In the days that followed, doctors diagnosed Rozia with a serious spinal injury. She had survived, but her recovery was slow. Her mother described how her relief soon became intertwined with grief. “I keep thinking about the mothers who lost their children,” Hazera said. “My daughter survived, but so many others never return home.”

In July, days of intense rain triggered landslides and flash floods in Kutupalong, the vast refugee camp complex near the port city of Cox’s Bazar on the Bay of Bengal. Many makeshift shelters there are made of bamboo and tarpaulin and built on steep, deforested hillsides. During the monsoon season, they can become deadly traps. The Rohingya Coordination Platform, which organises humanitarian assistance for the Rohingya in Bangladesh, reports that the continuous rainfall between July 4 and 9 triggered at least 95 landslides. More than 26,000 refugees were affected, and more than 4,000 people had to be temporarily relocated.

The Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority from Myanmar’s Rakhine State, were effectively rendered stateless by a 1982 citizenship law. In August 2017, a military offensive forced more than 750,000 of them to flee to Bangladesh. The United Nations and international NGOs accuse Myanmar of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and acts of genocide. Today, more than one million Rohingya live in the overcrowded camps of Cox’s Bazar, the largest refugee settlement in the world.

“Whenever it rains, I am frightened”

Like so many others, Rozia Bibi arrived in 2017 with her family, her siblings and her mother, in one of the camps in Kutupalong. “When I heard people screaming that a hill had collapsed that morning, I completely lost my sense of direction,” Hazera recalled. “I ran straight to the madrasa and searched for my daughter.” She found utter chaos: Children trapped beneath mud and debris; parents screaming their children’s names as neighbours and volunteers frantically dug in mud and rubble with their bare hands. Although Rozia has since returned to the madrasa, the trauma has not disappeared. “Whenever it rains, I am frightened,” she says. “I keep thinking that the hill could collapse again.”

Shortly after the disaster, just a few metres away, another family was desperately searching for their 13-year-old daughter, Unaisha Bibi. Soon it became clear: Rozia had survived the disaster. Unaisha had not.

Mohammad Elias, Unaisha’s father, fled with his family eight years ago from the city of Maungdaw in western Myanmar. He had hoped they would be safe in Bangladesh. That hope shattered within minutes on that day in July. “People were screaming that the hill beside the madrasa had collapsed,” he said. “I ran home immediately and got my wife. We searched everywhere, but we couldn’t find Unaisha.” At Friendship Hospital, a hospital run by a Bangladeshi NGO near the Rohingya camps, they finally received the news they had feared: their eldest daughter, Unaisha, was dead. “It was my dream to give all my children a proper education and help them become good people,” Elias says. “Now I don’t even feel safe sending them to school or to the madrasa. All we wanted was a place where we could live safely. Now we live in constant fear.”

For Elias’s wife, Sura Khatun, grief has become part of her everyday life: “I often go to Unaisha’s grave and sit there with tears in my eyes. My children are my whole world.” She pauses before adding: “I keep thinking about how much pain my daughter must have endured before she died… I feel that pain every single day.”

For Rohingya community leader Shahid Ullah, the landslides in July were the latest chapter in a crisis that revisits the region with every monsoon. For several years, he has watched as the camps become increasingly precarious. Heavier rainfall, overcrowding and fragile infrastructure is a catastrophic combination. “We used to have heavy rain,” Shahid says. “But today it is much more intense and falls within a shorter period. Landslides are more frequent, and every year the damage gets worse.” But the refugees have no choice but to remain here. “There is simply nowhere else left,” Shahid says.

“We simply do not have enough land. All we can do it try to reduce the risk”

For many of those affected, the consequences extend beyond the immediate disaster. Flooded paths cut off access to schools and health centers, contaminated water increased the risk of disease, and damaged shelters left families literally out in the rain. Shahid calls for sturdier shelters, safer drainage, clean water, better health care and sustained investment in disaster preparedness. “But above all,” he adds, “the only real solution is for the Rohingya to be able to return safely to Myanmar, with their human rights guaranteed there.”

Professor Mohammad Sofi Ullah of the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Dhaka explains: “The places where the Rohingya live today used to be covered by forests.” But when hundreds of thousands of Rohingya arrived in the region in 2017, vast areas were cleared for temporary shelters. “Trees and vegetation gave the soil stability,” he says. “Today, the hills are far more vulnerable to landslides.” Deforestation alone, however, does not explain the growing danger. Climate change is altering rainfall patterns in Bangladesh. “The soil cannot absorb that much water so quickly. When the ground becomes saturated, the hills lose their stability and collapse.”

As climate-related disasters become more frequent, humanitarian aid is coming under pressure. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), heavy rainfall, flash floods and landslides damaged 5,663 shelters in the refugee camps in July. Hundreds of community facilities – including learning centres, water and sanitation facilities, roads and bridges – were also hit. While the need for aid is on the rise, humanitarian funding continues to decline. The 2026 Joint Response Plan (JRP) is coordinated by the government in Dhaka to help Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. It states that sizations will need more than 700 million US dollars in total to provide the basics to refugees and particularly vulnerable people in host communities. But now, corresponding programmess must be scaled back or discontinued altogether. “Every monsoon is becoming deadlier for Rohingya refugees,” Meenakshi Ganguly, Human Rights Watch’s deputy Asia director, said recently. “These are not simply natural disasters, but predictable consequences of policies that put refugees’ lives at risk.”

Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, the government official responsible for refugee relief and the repatriation of the Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar, also complains about the lack of assistance. The camps are in a region where around 30 square kilometres of land were originally designated for refugee settlements. That was almost nine years ago. “International funding has gradually declined during this time,” Rahman says. “Regular work to stabilize the hills and maintain wells, latrines, water supply networks, drainage systems and shelters in the hilly camps is no longer being carried out to the required extent.” Yet according to the government official, the number of refugees continues to grow. “New people are still arriving, children are born, families are growing, and households are splitting into separate units.” This creates a constant need for new shelters. “We regularly relocate people from areas identified as being at very high risk and move them to comparatively safer locations,” Rahman says. “But the reality is that we simply do not have enough land. All we can do is try to  reduce the risk.”

And that is the daily reality for the families of Mohammad Elias and Hazera Khatun. They escaped the violence in Myanmar only to face a new threat: the consequences of climate change, increasingly intense monsoon rains and collapsing hillsides.