Flash floods and landslides driven by seasonal monsoon rains have killed at least 50 people in Bangladesh over the past week, authorities announced on Sunday, with tens of thousands more forced from their homes and hundreds of thousands of households cut off from essential services.

The hardest-hit area is the southeastern Chattogram district, where divisional commissioner Mohammed Ziauddin confirmed that all 50 deaths occurred, 29 of them caused by landslides burying people alive. Two individuals remain missing. Around 35,000 people have sought refuge in government-run shelters, and authorities have opened approximately 4,000 centres across the affected region. The disaster ministry identified seven districts — Chattogram, Cox's Bazar, Bandarban, Rangamati, Khagrachhari, Moulvibazar and Habiganj — where flooding is isolating families and disrupting daily life, with nearly 268,000 households lacking access to basic services. Army and border guard personnel have been delivering food, drinking water and other supplies by boat to cut-off communities. Shortages of both food and safe drinking water are deepening the crisis, with many residents unable to cook as their homes and kitchens remain submerged.

The human cost extends beyond statistics. Mohammed Forkan, one of those who died in Chattogram, could not be buried beside his parents because the local cemetery was submerged under chest-deep water. His nephew Nizamuddin described placing the body on a bamboo raft and swimming alongside it until a small patch of dry government land could be found for a modest funeral. Separately, landslides last week tore through Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazar — a coastal district south of Chattogram — killing at least 15 people. More than 1.2 million Rohingya refugees, most of whom fled violence in neighbouring Myanmar, live in densely packed shelters on deforested hillsides, conditions that make the terrain dangerously unstable during monsoon season.

Forecasters offered cautious optimism for the southeast but warned the crisis is not over. Sarder Udoy Raihan of Bangladesh's Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre said conditions in the southeastern districts should improve soon, but cautioned that the monsoon remains active over the country's northeastern and northern regions, where further flooding is possible. Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation threaded by hundreds of rivers, is consistently ranked among the world's most disaster-prone countries, with seasonal rains regularly triggering floods, river erosion and landslides. Scientists warn that climate change is amplifying the frequency and intensity of such extreme rainfall events, making each monsoon season potentially more destructive than the last.