The national disaster management authority (NDMA) said, death toll from monsoon flooding in Pakistan has reached 1,061 since June, on Monday, with 28 more people having died in the past 24 hours.

Afghan Voice Agency (AVA)_Monitoring, A huge relief operation was under way on Monday and international aid began trickling in.

The final toll could be higher as hundreds of villages in the mountainous north have been cut off by flood-swollen rivers washing away roads and bridges, AFP reported.

Authorities were still trying to reach cut-off villages in the mountainous north, even as the flooded southern Sindh province braced on Sunday for a fresh deluge from swollen rivers in the north.

The Indus river that courses through Pakistan’s second-most populous region is fed by dozens of mountain tributaries to the north, but many have burst their banks following record rains and glacier melt.

Torrents of water are expected to reach Sindh in the next few days, adding misery to the millions already affected by the floods.

“Right now, Indus is in high flood,” said Aziz Soomro, the supervisor of Sukkur Barrage, a massive colonial-era construction that regulates the river’s flow and redirects water to a vast system of canals.

Pakistan needs financial help to deal with the floods, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari told Reuters on Sunday.

He hoped financial institutions such as the IMF would take the economic fallout into account. “I haven’t seen destruction of this scale, I find it very difficult to put into words … it is overwhelming,” Bhutto-Zardari said, adding many crops that provided much of the population’s livelihoods had been wiped out.

“Obviously this will have an effect on the overall economic situation,” he said. The IMF board will decide this week on whether to release $1.2 billion as part of the seventh and eighth tranches of Pakistan’s bailout programme, which it entered in 2019.

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