Combined death toll in Turkey and Syria passes 17,000.
The death toll in Turkey from Monday’s earthquakes has risen to 14,014, the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has said, with more than 63,000 people injured.
Visiting the quake-hit province of Gaziantep, Erdoğan said more than 6,400 buildings had been destroyed and that Turkey aimed to build new three and four-Storey buildings in the region within one year, Reuters reports.
A total of at least 3,162 are confirmed dead in Syria, with government-held areas reporting 1,262 people dead and 1,900 killed in the rebel-controlled northwest, meaning the combined tally in both countries now stands at 17, 176.
Experts have said that it is likely to continue to rise.
News that the first UN aid convoy has crossed the border from Turkey into northwest Syria is promising, but far more will be needed in a region that was in dire humanitarian need before Monday’s earthquake struck.
While up to two more crossings may open if security stays good, the UN has described the Bab Al-Hawa border crossing as a lifeline for accessing the rebel-held area of Syria, where an estimated 4 million people, many fleeing the country’s 11-year civil war, were already relying on aid to survive.
“We need lifesaving aid,” the UN’s special envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, said. “It’s desperately needed by civilians wherever they are, irrespective of borders and boundaries. We need it urgently through the fastest, most direct and most effective routes. They need more of absolutely everything.”
Rescue workers have said the UN’s efforts are insufficient and what was most in need was heavy equipment for search-and-rescue operations where many people are believed to be still buried under debris.
“The UN are not delivering the aid that we are in most need of to help us save lives, with time running out,” Raed al Saleh, who leads the main volunteer rescue group known as the White Helmets, told Reuters.
NGOs and rescue workers have said the rescue operation is relying on simple tools like pickaxes and shovels and old cranes in urban areas where whole neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has underlined the importance for humanitarian organisations of making sure that people who have survived the quake “continue to survive”.
The WHO’s incident response manager, Robert Holden, told reporters in Geneva many were surviving “out in the open, in worsening and horrific conditions” with severely disrupted water, fuel and electricity supplies:
We are in real danger of seeing a secondary disaster which may cause harm to more people than the initial disaster if we don’t move with the same pace and intensity as we are doing on the search and rescue side. People need the basic elements to survive the next period.