A Myanmar military airstrike on a camp housing people displaced by the civil war killed 12 people on Friday evening in the westernmost state of Rakhine, witnesses and a rescue worker said on Saturday.

Source: AFP, Nov 14, 2026

The strike hit the Byar La IDP camp in Ponnagyun township, northeast of the state capital, Sittwe. Chit Su Wai, a 27-year-old shopkeeper, described how her daughter, her aunt and her mother were killed in the bombing. “We did not hear the sound of the fighter jet – it just came and dropped the bombs,” she said. “It has broken our family.”

Chit Su Wai said 12 people died in the attack, a toll confirmed by Khine Hein Htet, chairman of the Phyusin Yin Khwin Foundation, a rescue and emergency service. He said a five-year-old was among the dead and 18 others were injured in the camp, where many residents had been living for four years. “They believed the camp was safe, and they sheltered there together. When we arrived at the scene, most of the victims had died in one place,” he said, adding that it was not a combat area: “We never thought this camp would be targeted.”

Source: Al Jazeera English, Nov 14, 2026

By Saturday the camp was a mess of collapsed bamboo houses, with the wreckage of an upturned vehicle mixed among the debris of household goods and clothes. Locals had already removed the bodies, wrapping them in plastic sheeting and burying them in makeshift graves, AFP reported.

Aung Kyaw Min, a 45-year-old tuk-tuk driver, rushed to the village where his brother and sister lived after hearing of the attack, and found both of them dead; the next day he learned his mother had also been killed, while other relatives, including a 10-year-old, were still missing. “Now all of them – my sister, brother, including my mother – were all killed. My niece and nephews are still missing, I don’t know where to find them,” he said.

A state under blockade and regular airstrikes

Myanmar has been consumed by civil war since the military staged a coup five years ago, provoking armed resistance from democracy activists and ethnic minority factions. The western coastal state of Rakhine is among the regions worst hit: it is controlled almost entirely by the ethnic minority Arakan Army (AA), and has been blockaded by the military and pummelled with regular airstrikes. AFP said it was not possible to contact the Myanmar military for comment on the latest attack.

Friday's camp strike came two days after another junta airstrike on a residential ward in Mrauk-U, also in Rakhine, killed two young residents and injured eight. Read: Myanmar junta airstrike kills two in Mrauk-U, Rakhine

The ACLED conflict monitor estimates that more than 100,000 people have been killed on all sides in Myanmar since the civil war began. No investigation into the Byar La strike had been announced by Saturday, and the military had not commented — leaving the families in the camp, who believed they had found a safe place after four years of displacement, to bury their dead and search for the missing.