GENEVA (AFP) – Life-threatening levels of malnutrition have risen dramatically among Rohingya refugee children who have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh, the United Nations warned Friday.

The UN children’s agency said preliminary data indicated a full 7.5 percent of the children crammed into one of the camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district were at risk of dying from severe acute malnutrition.

More than 600,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state since late August during military operations that the United Nations has described as ethnic cleansing and the world’s most acute refugee crisis.

Around half of them are children.

“It’s very worrying to see the condition of children who keep arriving,” UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac told reporters in Geneva after a recent trip to the camps.

The agency and its partners are…