Key Takeaways
- At least 44 dead, over a million stranded. Days of intense monsoon rain have triggered flooding and landslides across southeastern Bangladesh, killing at least 44 people and leaving more than a million stranded. Around 268,000 households across seven districts have been cut off.
- The Rohingya camps were hit hardest. In the Cox's Bazar refugee camps, landslides and a collapsed retaining wall killed at least 16 people, most of them children. Thousands of shelters were destroyed and more than 20,000 refugees were relocated from the most dangerous slopes.
- A record-breaking downpour. Chattogram recorded 412mm of rain in 24 hours on 7 July, its heaviest in 43 years, bringing the city to a standstill and saturating the hillsides that then gave way.
- Deadly by design. The camps are a maze of bamboo-and-tarpaulin shelters clinging to steep, deforested hills. With the tree cover long cleared and the soil saturated, the slopes collapse under heavy rain.
- Aid cuts have deepened the danger. The 2026 humanitarian appeal for the Rohingya is 26% smaller than last year, and the World Food Programme faces a shortfall of about $147 million. UNHCR says the funding cuts have directly heightened the monsoon risk.
Days of relentless monsoon rain have turned the hills and floodplains of southeastern Bangladesh into a disaster zone. As of 11 July 2026, flooding and landslides had killed at least 44 people and left more than a million stranded, with the sprawling Rohingya refugee camps around Cox’s Bazar bearing the heaviest human cost. The map below shows where the worst damage has fallen.
The catastrophe is concentrated in the country’s Chattogram Division, the hilly, monsoon-battered southeast that wraps around the Bay of Bengal. It is a landscape uniquely exposed to this kind of disaster, and this year the rain has been extreme.
The scale of the disaster
Bangladesh’s Disaster Management Ministry lists seven flood-hit districts, led by Chattogram, Cox’s Bazar, Bandarban, Rangamati and Khagrachhari in the southeast. In Chattogram district alone, some 450,000 people were left stranded across low-lying upazilas such as Satkania, as swollen rivers and hillside runoff combined. Nationwide, roughly 268,000 households have been cut off, many now reachable only by boat as the army and navy ferry in food, water and medicine.
A record downpour on unstable hills
The trigger was extraordinary rainfall. On 7 July, the port city of Chattogram recorded 412mm of rain in 24 hours, its heaviest in 43 years, as a low-pressure system over the Bay of Bengal fed days of intense monsoon downpours over the region. Urban streets became rivers, and across the surrounding hills the saturated ground began to slide.
Southeastern Bangladesh is especially vulnerable because so many people live on or below steep slopes. When the hills are stripped of trees and the soil is soaked, gravity does the rest, and the results are deadliest where the housing is flimsiest.
The Rohingya camps: the human core of the tragedy
Nowhere is that more true than in the Rohingya refugee camps near Cox’s Bazar, home to roughly a million people who fled Myanmar and now live in the world’s largest refugee settlement. The camps are a dense maze of bamboo-framed, tarpaulin-covered shelters built on steep, deforested hillsides, and those slopes have been failing.
At least 16 refugees, most of them children, have been killed. In the early hours of 6 July, three separate landslides tore through Camps 7, 11 and 15, killing eight people including five children, among them a family of a couple and their four-year-old son. Two days later, on 8 July, a hillside retaining wall collapsed onto a religious school in Ukhiya, killing eight more, seven of them students and one a teacher. Aid agencies report thousands of shelters destroyed, more than 200 landslide and flash-flood incidents in the camps since 6 July, and over 20,000 refugees relocated from the most dangerous ground.
Aid cuts have made it worse
The disaster is colliding with a funding crisis. The 2026 humanitarian appeal for the Rohingya response is set at $710 million, about 26% lower than in 2025, and the World Food Programme faces a shortfall of roughly $147 million, having already moved to reduced, tiered food rations. UNHCR has warned bluntly that the funding cuts have heightened the monsoon risk, forcing reductions in the very slope-stabilisation and camp-maintenance work that keeps refugees safe. Save the Children ties the worsening conditions directly to donors scaling back.
Still raining
The danger is not over. Forecasters warned of continued heavy rain and rising rivers across the southeast, keeping the flood and landslide risk high, and raising the threat of waterborne disease in the crowded camps. The Bangladesh emergency is also part of a wider South Asian monsoon crisis: the same weeks have brought deadly flooding and landslides to India, Nepal and Pakistan, in what scientists describe as a pattern of longer dry spells broken by sudden, intense bursts of rain.
The bottom line
This is a disaster of geography and circumstance combined: record rain falling on cleared hillsides where a million of the world’s most vulnerable people have nowhere safer to go, at the exact moment the money to protect them is being cut. The monsoon has months left to run, and southeastern Bangladesh remains dangerously exposed.
Data and references (as of 11 July 2026):
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