Hopes fall as death toll tops 21,000
THE death toll from the massive earthquake in Turkey and Syria has topped 21,000 as the first UN aid reached Syrian rebel-held zones but hopes of finding more survivors faded.
The chief of the World Health Organization said he was on his way to Syria, as bit-ter cold hampered the search of thousands of flattened buildings and threatened the lives of many surviving quake victims who are without shel-ter or drinking water.
Relatives were left scouring body bags laid out in a hospital car park in Turkey’s southern city of Antakya to search for missing relatives, an indication of the scale of the tragedy.
“We found my aunt, but not my uncle,” said Rania Zaboubi, a Syrian refugee who lost eight members of her family.
Chances of finding survi-vors have dimmed now that the 72-hour mark that experts consider the most likely period to save lives has passed.
The 7.8-magnitude quake struck early Monday as people slept, in a region where many had already suffered loss and displacement due to Syria’s brutal civil war.
WHO head Tedros Adhan-om Ghebreyesus said Thurs-day that he was heading to the disaster zone. “On my way to Syria, where WHO is support-ing essential health care in the areas affected by the recent earthquake,” he tweeted.
But in a potentially life-saving development, an aid convoy reached rebel-held north western Syria earlier in the day, the first since the quake, an official at the Bab al-Hawa border crossing said.
The crossing is the only way UN assistance can reach civil-ians without going through areas controlled by Syrian gov-ernment forces.
A decade of civil war and Syrian-Russian aerial bom-bardment had already de-stroyed hospitals, collapsed the economy and prompted elec-tricity and water shortages. UN Secretary-General An-tonio Guterres urged the UN Security Council to authorize the opening of new cross-bor-der humanitarian aid points between Turkey and Syria to deliver essential aid.
“This is the moment of unity, it’s not a moment to pol-iticise or to divide,” he said.