More than 15,000 Rohingya refugees are currently stuck in a border zone no-man’s land between Myanmar and Bangladesh without adequate sanitation, food and water.

“Suddenly, we just can't take thousands of people in,” Major Ashik bin Jalil of the Bangladesh Armed Forces told CTV’s Peter Akman. “It takes time.”

An estimated 600,000 Rohingya have now entered Bangladesh from Myanmar, fleeing violence that the United Nations has called “textbook ethnic cleansing.”

While many of them are now in crowded refugee camps inside Bangladesh, those along the border are being forced to wait in limbo in overcrowded, filthy conditions as Bangladesh and humanitarian agencies scramble to create more spaces for them.

"This cannot go on,” said J.J. Simon, who works with UNICEF. “It is a paddy field, with water around, there is no sanitation, there is no clean water, there is no food."

With journalists banned from the border zone, aid workers showed pictures of the squalid no man’s land. More than half of the 15,000 stranded people are children, they say. Many are believed to be sick and starving.

“They are suffering,” a Rohingya refugee told Akman. “The heat is killing them slowly.”

Family members of those who are stranded say they have waited three days to bring their loved ones food and water.

Aid groups are getting in, bringing just enough supplies to them alive. Those too sick to wait are carried out and transported to a hospital two hours away in the coastal city of Cox’s Bazar.

One of those people is Arifa Khatun and her nine-month-old baby, who was badly burned when Myanmar’s military allegedly torched their village.

"I was outside when soldiers set the fire,” she said. “I ran in and pulled her out just in time."

Myanmar’s government has denied the veracity of horror stories like Khatun’s, but Imam Hosen says he has proof of the Myanmar military’s atrocities in the form of a soldier’s bullet that is still lodged in his leg.

"We all woke up to gunfire,” he said. “I was running trying to get away when I was shot.”

The Bangladesh Armed Forces has not said how long this blockade will last: it all depends, they say, on how many Rohingya keep coming and how fast they can build more refugee camps.

With a report from CTV’s Peter Akman in Bangladesh