Nepal's army said it had rescued 119 people on Tuesday in a rare bright spot during a disaster that has killed more than 1,000 people and left thousands more missing after flash floods on the country's border with Tibet.

An army spokesperson said the day’s rescue work saved 118 Nepali nationals, including 44 women and 74 men, plus one British man. The British national has not been identified. The rescue did not end the wider emergency, but it did show that search teams are still finding survivors nearly a week after the disaster began.

The scale of the catastrophe remains staggering. Nepal's prime minister said 11,000 people have been rescued across the affected region, including 330 foreign nationals, while the Red Cross estimates that 93,000 people have been directly affected. At least 1,050 people have been confirmed dead in Nepal, and more than 4,000 remain missing. Chinese state media said 66 people were killed in Tibet.

Preliminary satellite analysis points to a glacier collapse high in the Himalayas as the primary trigger. The collapse was so large it was initially recorded as a magnitude-4.4 earthquake. It unleashed a torrent of water, mud and ice that tore along the Lhende Khola, Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers on Wednesday, overwhelming communities downstream and leaving rescue crews to work in unstable terrain.

The conditions have made the search slow and dangerous. Officials say crews are now focused on reaching about 600 workers believed to be trapped inside tunnels at hydropower stations in the region. The army spokesperson said teams were working through the tunnels and that the effort was continuing even as the debris field remained unstable. That task is especially hard because any shift in the rubble or riverbanks can block access routes and put rescuers in danger.

The disaster has also become an international rescue effort. A rapid deployment team from the United Kingdom arrived in Nepal on Saturday to support Britons and their families, part of a £5m British commitment to relief and recovery. That detail reflects how the disaster has spread far beyond one country, with foreign nationals, remote infrastructure and cross-border weather all caught up in the same emergency.

The rescue of 119 people is important partly because it shows that survival is still possible even after days of chaos. But it also exposes how much remains unresolved. The missing count is still above 4,000, the region's hydropower tunnels remain a major search focus, and the terrain is still unstable enough to slow every operation. In disasters like this, each rescued person offers proof that the search matters, while every missing person shows how far the recovery has to go.

Searchers are also dealing with a landscape that has been physically transformed by water and debris, which means routes that were passable on one day can become dangerous the next. That makes the rescue effort a logistical operation as much as a humanitarian one, and it helps explain why officials continue to describe the terrain as unstable. Even where survivors are found, the path back out can be as dangerous as the path in.

Scientists have long warned that glacier and ice-bound terrain becomes less stable as temperatures rise. The UN's top scientific advisory body said in 2023 that glaciers and permafrost regions would become increasingly unstable in a warming world. That does not explain any single event on its own, but it does help place Nepal's catastrophe in a broader climate context.

For now, the rare rescue of 119 people offers little comfort against the broader scale of loss. The main numbers still tell the story: more than 1,000 dead, more than 4,000 missing and a mountain region struggling to dig itself out of an unfolding disaster.