The toll from last week’s earthquake in Turkey and Syria rose above 35,000 on Monday, as rescue teams started to wind down the search for survivors and the aid effort shifted to hundreds of thousands of people made homeless.
Eight days after the 7.8-magnitude tremor, Turkish media reported a handful of people were still being pulled from the rubble as excavators dug through ruined cities.
The confirmed death toll rose to 35,224 as officials and medics said 31,643 people had died in Türkiye and 3,581 in Syria after the February 6 earthquake, the fifth deadliest since the start of the 21st century.
The United Nations has decried the failure to ship desperately needed aid to war-torn regions of Syria and warned that the toll is set to rise even higher as experts caution that hopes for finding people alive dim with each passing day.
Send any stuff you can because there are millions of people here and they all need to be fed,” Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu appealed to Turks late Sunday.
In Kahramanmaras, close to the epicentre, 30,000 tents have been installed, 48,000 people are sheltering in schools and another 11,500 in sports halls, he said.
While hundreds of rescue teams were still working, efforts had ended in seven parts of the province, he added.
In Antakya, clean-up teams started to evacuate rubble and erect basic toilets as the telephone network started to come back in parts of the town, an AFP reporter said.
The city was patrolled by a strong police and military presence which authorities deployed to prevent looting following several incidents over the weekend.
Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay late Sunday said 108,000 buildings were damaged across the quake-hit zone with 1.2 million people being housed in student accommodation and 400,000 people evacuated from the affected region.
Source: eNCA
In other news – The death toll from Turkey -Syria earthquakes top 34 000
It had been nearly a week since a pair of powerful earthquakes shattered this town in southern Turkey, and families with missing loved ones were out again — as they had been each day before — to follow the painstaking search for survivors.
Men and women watched rescue workers from the rooftops, shouting out advice as teams drilled cautiously through unexcavated rooms. “That’s his bedroom right in there,” one man cried out. “It’s that one: Learn more
