Under the blazing desert sun, the charred remains of the village of Bandala in eastern Chad lie scattered.

Once home to hundreds of people, Bandala is now nothing more than scorched earth and broken pots, littered unceremoniously across the sand.

Occasionally there are signs of the life people once led here: an abandoned shoe; a blackened kettle; plastic biscuit wrappers flapping in the dusty breeze.

But the devastation is clear. Almost every hut in this village has been razed to the ground, and the people have long since fled.

Bandala is one of dozens of villages that have been attacked in a wave of inter-ethnic violence pitting Arabs and black Africans that has displaced 120,000 civilians in eastern Chad. At least 70 of the villages attacked have also been torched.

The British aid agency Oxfam is now warning that attacks against the local population must not be allowed to reach the levels seen in neighbouring Darfur, where over 200,000 Sudanese have died in four years of political and ethnic conflict.

"Every day, more and more people in eastern Chad are suffering the consequences of violent conflict, and the situation is spiralling out of control," Roland Van Hauwermeiren, head of Oxfam in Chad, said in a statement.

"We need to put an end to the attacks now."

The United Nations Security Council is considering the deployment of a peacekeeping mission to eastern Chad to aid humanitarian work, calm ethnic tensions and stop marauding Janjaweed Arab militia spilling across the border from Darfur.

With a long-running rebellion against President Idriss Deby's 17-year rule, the government presence is too thinly stretched to protect its people.

DOUBLE CRISIS

In the nearby town of Goz Beida, the displaced have been arriving in droves.

The town has a population of 5,000, but the arrival of both Sudanese refugees from Darfur and, more recently, displaced Chadians means some 50,000 people are now competing for the same scarce resources.

Aid workers complain of an extraordinary "double" humanitarian crisis as more than 230,000 refugees who escaped attacks in Darfur in 2003 and 2004 and joined by tens of thousands of Chadians fleeing fighting at home.

Water is a particular concern, especially as Chad's long dry season is only just beginning. "The town is exploding," an aid worker told Reuters. "You could say it's under siege."

Several camps for displaced Chadians have sprung up in the valleys around Goz Beida over the past year.

One of them is Gassire. Two months ago this was a quiet village - now it is home to 12,000 hungry and scared people.

Dozens of flimsy straw shelters dot the barren desert landscape, providing scant protection from the driving winds and relentless heat.

One of the new arrivals here is Khadija, a frail and elderly woman who says she was beaten by Arabs when she returned to her village of Jamena to collect millet from her fields.

"I didn't think any man could attack a woman my age," said Khadija, pointing out the bruises and cuts inflicted by her attackers.

"There were two men. One had a gun and the other had a big stick which he used to hit me. The man with the gun stood to one side, ready to shoot any person who tried to help me."

Khadija, so frail her relatives carried her from her straw shelter to talk to journalists, said she still feels in danger.

"I'm still afraid of them and I think they could come here to attack again," she said. "But God will help us."