COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh - Ducking as mortar fire exploded around them, Rohingya refugee Mustafa Kamal and his family narrowly escaped the attack by a rebel militia on their town in western Myanmar.

Crowds had gathered on a small island to seek shelter after witnessing killings in the coastal town of Maungdaw, he said, but "many died on the spot", including one of his nephews, Noor Sadek.

Others crawled and swam to reach neighbouring Bangladesh, he said.

His family are among many Rohingya, members of a persecuted mostly Muslim minority, who fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state in recent days, as fighting escalates between the troops of the ruling junta and the Arakan Army, the powerful ethnic militia that recruits from the Buddhist majority.

Reuters was not able to determine how many Rohingya had crossed into Bangladesh, where close to a million Rohingya live in refugee camps outside the coastal town of Cox’s Bazar.

But medical charity Medicines Sans Frontières said its doctors had treated 54 people for violence-related injuries in recent days, 40 percent of them women and children.

"We were seeing lots of gunshots, shrapnel, mortar shell injuries, all indicative of indiscriminate," Orla Murphy, the group's Bangladesh representative, told Reuters. "They were life-threatening trauma wounds that we were treating."

The influx of refugees, who will have to stay with relatives, stretching resources, will make food supplies scarce, said the representative of a panel of displaced Rohingya.

"They are suffering from an extreme food crisis," added Kamal Hossain, chairman of the panel. "The government and camp authorities should arrange their food."

Many dozens of Rohingya, including a heavily pregnant woman and her two-year-old daughter, were killed last week in drone attacks in Maungdaw that three witnesses said were carried out by the Arakan Army, Reuters reported.

The rebel group and the junta blamed one another for the attack. Several boats carrying refugees to Bangladesh were sunk, killing more, Bangladesh media said.

The latest wave of attacks, including the burning of a Rohingya town by the Arakan Army in May, is the biggest surge in violence against the Rohingya since a 2017 Myanmar military-led campaign that the United Nations said was carried out with genocidal intent forced more than 730,000 to flee to Bangladesh.

'FIGHTING FOR LIFE'

Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, a Bangladesh refugee relief official based in Cox’s Bazar, said Rohingya had been seeking safety in increased numbers since the drone attack but did not say how many had crossed the border.

"I have heard that many dead bodies are floating across to Bangladesh and a humanitarian crisis has occurred across the shore in Maungdaw," he said.

Bangladesh is in no position to accept more Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, the South Asian nation's de-facto foreign minister, Mohammad Touhid Hossain, told Reuters on Thursday, asking neighbouring India and other countries to do more.

Hossain also called for more international pressure on the Arakan Army to stop the attacks on the Rohingya in Rakhine state.

"But when someone arrives with a bullet injury, fighting for life, or a pregnant woman arrives fighting for life, we are not that inhuman that we will turn them away," Bangladesh's Rahman said.

The United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, said it did not have information on the number of Rohingya who had crossed into Bangladesh.

Another man who fled his home with his young family, Mohammed Saber, said about 60 people were killed in his village when the Arakan Army raided it, among them his two-year-old nephew, Mujibul Hasan.

They paid traffickers to take them by boat to Bangladesh but the ship came under attack, which killed dozens aboard, he said.

The family is now sheltering with an uncle, but Saber has no money. He needs to buy medicine for his children.

"I will do whatever it takes to keep my family alive," he said.

  - Reuters