Rescuers pulled out children Friday from the rubble of the Turkey-Syria earthquake as the toll approached 24,000 and a winter freeze compounded the suffering for nearly one million people estimated to be in urgent need of food.
The stench of death hung over Turkey’s eastern city of Kahramanmaras—the epicenter of the first 7.8-magnitude tremor that upturned millions of lives in the pre-dawn hours of Monday.
It is located in a remote region filled with people already displaced by war.
The United Nations warned that at least 870,000 people were now in urgent need of hot meals across Turkey and Syria. In Syria alone, up to 5.3 million people may have been made homeless.
“That is a huge number and comes to a population already suffering mass displacement,” said Sivanka Dhanapala, the Syria representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
But miraculous rescues continued more than 100 hours after the first tremor tore apart roads and flattened hundreds of buildings while a winter storm raged over the region.
A pregnant woman named Zahide Kaya was pulled out of the rubble alive after 115 hours, in Nurdagi district of Gaziantep province, southeastern Turkey, according to Turkish state news agency Anadolu.
Her six-year-old daughter named Kubra was rescued from the ruins an hour earlier.
The mother was injured and taken to hospital, but there was no immediate word on her unborn child.