PESHAWAR: Death toll in floods that have lashed Pakistan soared past 800 on Saturday as the United Nations estimated that some one million people were affected.

Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister for Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan’s northwest, said the death reports have come in from districts around the region this past week.

Another 150 people were missing in the northwestern province, where many impoverished families live in remote mountain villages.

The northwest has been the hardest hit province in the extraordinary flooding caused by the monsoon rains.

Hundreds of homes and vast swathes of farmland were destroyed in the northwest and Azad Kashmir, with the main highway to China reportedly cut and communities isolated as monsoon rains caused flash floods and landslides.

Floodwaters were receding in the northwest, officials said, but fresh rains were expected to lash other parts of the country in the coming days.

Rescuers trying to reach thousands of Pakistani flood victims were hampered by deluged roads and damaged bridges on Saturday, while fears of disease rose as some evacuees showed signs of diarrhoea, fever and other illnesses.

People clung to fences and each other as water gushed over their heads, TV footage showed.

Scores of men, women and children sat on roofs.

“There are very bad conditions,” said Amjad Ali, a rescue worker in the Nowshera area. “They have no water, no food.”

Muqaddir Khan, 25, who arrived with nine other family members, told AFP in a suburb of Peshawar that he had lost everything in flood.

“I laboured hard in Saudi Arabia for three years and set up a small shop which was swept away by flood in minutes. I have lost everything,” Khan said.

Across the border in India, the capital Delhi and commercial hub Mumbai received heavy rains on Saturday and flooding was reported.