A rescue worker and an ethnic minority armed group told AFP on Thursday that a Myanmar junta airstrike killed at least 40 people in a village in western Rakhine state.
The Arakan Army (AA) is fighting the military for control of Rakhine, where it has seized swathes of territory in the past year, all but cutting off the capital Sittwe.
The Rakhine conflict is one element of the bloody chaos that has engulfed Myanmar since the military ousted Aung San Suu K.
According to AA spokesperson Khaing Thu Kha, a military jet bombed Kyauk Ni Maw on Ramree Island around 1:20 pm (0650 GMT) on Wednesday, causing a fire that engulfed over 500 houses.
“According to initial reports, 40 innocent civilians were killed and 20 were wounded,” he said.
A local rescue group member reported 41 deaths and 52 injuries.
“At the moment, we don’t even have enough betadine and methylated spirit to treat them, as the transportation is hard,” the rescue worker said on condition of anonymity to protect their safety.
Ramree Island is home to a planned China-backed deep-sea port that will serve as a gateway for Beijing to the Indian Ocean, but construction has been halted by the unrest.
Photos of the aftermath of the bombing show dazed residents walking through charred, smoking ruins, the ground littered with corrugated metal, trees stripped bare of leaves, and buildings reduced to a few scraps of walls.
The military is struggling to fight opposition to its rule.
In addition to the youth-led “People’s Defence Forces” that arose to counter the coup, the military is fighting various long-established and well-equipped ethnic minority armed organisations, including the AA, that hold huge sections of land along the country’s border.
In November, the United Nations Development Programme warned that Rakhine was on the verge of famine as violence hampered commerce and agricultural production.
The United Nations said this week that the violence in Myanmar had displaced more than 3.5 million people, an increase of 1.5 million from last year.
The picture for the coming year was “grim,” according to the UN humanitarian organisation OCHA, with 19.9 million people—more than a third of the population—expected to require assistance by 2025.
