UN expects toll to double

CRIES OF SURVIVORS: SECURITY CONCERNS END SOME AID OPERATIONS

Thousands of rescuers search flattened suburbs in freezing weather.

Rescuers pulled a seven-month-old baby and a teenage girl from the rubble yesterday, nearly a week after an earthquake devastated Türkiye and Syria and killed more than 33 000 people.

United Nations relief chief Martin Griffiths said he expected the death toll to at least double after he arrived in southern Türkiye on Saturday to assess the quake’s damage.

Tens of thousands of rescue workers are scouring flattened neighbourhoods despite freezing weather that has deepened the misery of millions now in desperate need of aid.

Security concerns led some aid operations to be suspended, and dozens of people have been arrested for looting or trying to defraud victims in the aftermath of the quake in Türkiye, according to state media. But miraculous tales of survival still emerged from the destruction and despair.

“Is the world there?” asked 70-year-old Menekse Tabak as she was pulled out from the concrete in the southern city of Kahramanmaras – the epicentre of Monday’s 7.8-magnitude tremor – to applause and cries praising God, according to a video on state broadcaster TRT Haber.

A seven-month-old baby named Hamza was also rescued in southern Hatay more than 140 hours after the quake, while Esma Sultan, 13, was also saved in Gaziantep, state media reported.

Families were racing against time to find their missing relatives’ bodies in southern Türkiye.

“We hear [the authorities] will no longer keep the bodies waiting after a certain period of time; they say they will take them and bury them,” Tuba Yolcu said in Kahramanmaras.

Another family clutched each other in grief at a cotton field transformed into a cemetery, with a seemingly endless stream of bodies arriving for swift burial.

Griffiths toured quake-hit areas of Kahramanmaras on Saturday, telling Sky News he expected the death toll to “double or more”.

“Soon, the search and rescue people will make way for the humanitarian agencies whose job it is to look after the extraordinary numbers of those affected for the next months,” he tweeted.

The United Nations has warned that at least 870 000 people urgently need hot meals across Türkiye and Syria. –

END OF THE ROAD. A man walks next to rubble and a damaged police car in a street of the Antakia historical city in Hatay on Saturday after the quake hit in freeziong cold weather.

Pictures: AFP SCOURING. An Emirati rescuer, with the help of a dog, searches for victims amid the rubble of a collapsed building in the regime-controlled town of Jableh in Latakia, northwest of Damaskus.

Picture: AFP LOSS. A boy who lost family saves a book amid the rubble in Syria’s Aleppo province.