The toll from last week’s earthquake in Turkiye 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 Turkiye 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.
Lack of aid in northern Syria
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.
Aid packages, mainly clothes, were opened and spread across the streets in Hatay province, according to NTV. One video showed aid workers throwing clothes randomly into a crowd as people tried to grab whatever they could.
A convoy with supplies for northwest Syria arrived via Turkiye, but the UN’s relief chief Martin Griffiths said more was needed for millions whose homes were destroyed.
“We have so far failed the people in northwest Syria. They rightly feel abandoned. Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived,” Griffiths had said on Twitter.
