Over 11,000 death as been recorded so far as the death toll of the Turkey and Syria earthquake keep increasing.
Officials and medics said 8,574 people have died in Turkey and 2,662 in Syria, bringing the total to 11,236. But that could still increase dramatically if the worst fears of experts are realised.
The hope of rescuing more people from under the rubble is now fading, as time passes since Monday’s pre-dawn magnitude 7.8 earthquake, the largest in Turkey since 1939, when about 33,000 people died in the eastern Erzincan province.
Tragic images of a newborn pulled alive from the rubble and a broken father clutching his dead daughter’s hand have revealed the heavy tragedy of the disaster.
A three-year-old boy was pulled from beneath the rubble nearly two days after an apartment building collapsed in Kahramanmaras, a Turkish city near the epicenter.
The boy’s father, Ertugrul Kisi, who himself had been rescued earlier, sobbed as his son was pulled free and loaded into an ambulance.
A few hours later, rescuers pulled a 10-year-old girl from the rubble of her home in the city of Adiyaman. Amid applause from onlookers, her grandfather kissed her and spoke softly to her as she was loaded into an ambulance.
In the northwestern Syrian town of Jindires, residents found a crying newborn still connected by the umbilical cord to her deceased mother. The baby reportedly was the only member of her family to survive.
The rescue team, also known as the Syria Civil Defence, said on Twitter that the number of casualties was expected to “rise significantly due to the presence of hundreds of families under the rubble, more than 50 hours after the earthquake”.
The World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that time is running out for the thousands injured and those still feared trapped.
Source: Aljazeera News