Pakistan floods that killed 1,000 ‘may not have peaked yet’ | world news

Widespread flooding in Pakistan that has killed more than 1,000 people since mid-June may not have peaked yet, experts have warned.

All four provinces of the country were hit by unusually heavy rains, with more than 30 million people affected.

Flash floods swept away villages, crops and 800,000 head of cattle, while soldiers and relief workers evacuated stranded residents to relief camps and delivered food to thousands of displaced Pakistanis.

Nearly 300,000 homes have been destroyed, many roads are impassable and there have been widespread power cuts.

Peter Ophoff, from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told Sky News: “The monsoon season should have stopped at the end of July. We are now at the end of August and we still have very heavy rains. people think we haven’t peaked yet.”

The death toll has reached at least 1,061 people after new deaths were reported in several different provinces.

Floods from the Swat River have hit Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where tens of thousands of people – particularly in Charsadda and Nowshehra districts – have been evacuated from their homes to camps in government buildings.

Some 180,000 people were evacuated from the villages of Charsadda and 150,000 from Nowshehra.

Sherry Rehman, Pakistansaid in a video on Twitter that his country was experiencing a “serious climate catastrophe, one of the harshest of the decade”.

She said: “We are currently at ground zero on the front line of extreme weather events, in a relentless cascade of heat waves, wildfires, flash floods, multiple outbursts of glacial lakes, floods and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking non-stop havoc across the country.”

Peter Ophoff also told Sky News: “The situation in Pakistan is dire. We are experiencing the worst flooding in decades.

“The biggest problem is access. We have about 3,000 km (1,860 miles) of roads that have been destroyed, 160 bridges have been washed out.”

Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said Pakistan needed financial help to cope with the “crushing” floods and that many crops that provided livelihoods for a large part of the population had been wiped out.

The board of the International Monetary Fund will decide this week to release $1.2bn (£1bn) under the seventh and eighth tranches of Pakistan’s bailout package, which it entered in 2019.

He said: “Going forward, I would expect not only the IMF, but the international community and international agencies to really grasp the level of devastation.”

The Pakistani government has sent troops to assist civil authorities in rescue and relief operations.

The military leader, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, visited flood-affected areas in the southern province of Sindh to push ahead with relief operations.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani military said it had airlifted 22 trapped tourists to a valley in the north of the country to safety.