ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Monday urged the world for swift action by taking as a clarion call the deaths of children during the massive floods in Pakistan.

Over 500 children lost their lives in the unprecedented floods and rains while around 16 million have been affected, according to official data.

“Let these children not be arithmetic but a clarion call for swift action to rebuild their lives and future,” the prime minister posted on Twitter.

PM Sharif stressed that the global conversation on Pakistan’s flood devastation needed to be focused on the plight of children. He mentioned that disaster had adversely affected millions of children with over 500 dead.

“Super floods” in Pakistan have left 3.4 million children in need of “immediate, lifesaving support,” according to UNICEF.

Children, women suffer from water-borne diseases, death toll crosses 1,500

The floods – caused by record monsoon rains and dubbed by one minister as “the worst humanitarian disaster in a decade” – have impacted 16 million children in total, UNICEF’s Pakistan Representative Abdullah Fadil said following his visit this week to the country’s southern Sindh province.

That estimate came as the country’s National Disaster Management Authority updated the death toll from the floods since mid-June to 1,545 people, 552 of them children.