Bangash said some 180,000 people have been evacuated from Charsadda and 150,000 from Nowshehra district villages.

Khaista Rehman, 55, no relation to the climate minister, took shelter with his wife and three children on the side of the Islamabad-Peshawar highway after his home in Charsadda was submerged overnight.

“Thank God we are safe now on this road quite high from the flooded area,” he said. “Our crops are gone and our home is destroyed but I am grateful to Allah that we are alive and I will restart life with my sons.”

The unprecedented monsoon season has affected all four of the country’s provinces. Nearly 300,000 homes have been destroyed, numerous roads rendered impassable and electricity outages have been widespread, affecting millions of people.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari said the country would seek financial assistance and hoped that institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, which is deciding this week on bailout measures, would take the devastation into account.

“I haven’t seen destruction of this scale, I find it very difficult to put into words ... it is overwhelming,” Bhutto-Zardari told Reuters, adding many crops that provided much of the population’s livelihoods had been wiped out.

Pope Francis on Sunday said he wanted to assure his “closeness to the populations of Pakistan struck by flooding of disastrous proportions”. Speaking during a pilgrimage to the Italian town of L’Aquila, which was hit by a deadly earthquake in 2009, Francis said he was praying “for the many victims, for the injured and the evacuated, and so that international solidarity will be prompt and generous”.

Rehman told Turkish news outlet TRT World that by the time the rains recede, “we could well have one fourth or one third of Pakistan under water”.

“This is something that is a global crisis and of course we will need better planning and sustainable development on the ground ... We’ll need to have climate resilient crops as well as structures,” she said.

In May, Rehman told BBC Newshour that both the country’s north and south were witnessing extreme weather events because of rising temperatures. “So in north actually just now we are ... experiencing what is known as glacial lake outburst floods which we have many of because Pakistan is home to the highest number of glaciers outside the polar region.”

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The government has deployed soldiers to help civilian authorities in rescue and relief operations across the country. The Pakistani army also said in a statement it airlifted 22 tourists trapped in a valley in the country’s north to safety.

Prime Minister Shabaz Sharif visited flooding victims in city of Jafferabad in Baluchistan. He vowed the government would provide housing to all those who lost their homes.

AP