Death toll continues to mount

KAHRAMANMARAS, Turkiye — Rescuers pulled a 7-month-old baby and a teenage girl from the rubble on Sunday, nearly a week after an earthquake devastated Turkiye and Syria and killed more than 33,000.

After arriving in southern Turkiye on Saturday, the United Nations relief chief Martin Griffiths said he expected the death toll to at least double.

Tens of thousands of rescue workers were scouring flattened neighborhoods 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 Turkiye, state media said.

However, epic tales of survival continued to emerge amid the destruction and despair.

"Is the world there?" asked Menekse Tabak, 70, as she was pulled from the concrete in the southern city of Kahramanmaras, the epicenter of last Monday's magnitude-7.8 earthquake, to applause and cries praising God, according to a video on the state broadcaster TRT Haber.

A 7-month-old baby named Hamza was also rescued in southern Hatay province more than 140 hours after the quake, and Esma Sultan, 13, was saved in the province of Gaziantep, state media reported.

Families were fighting time to find their missing relatives' bodies.

"We hear (the authorities) will no longer keep the bodies waiting after a certain time," Tuba Yolcu said in Kahramanmaras. "They say they will take them and bury them."

The members of one family clutched each other in grief at a cotton field transformed into a cemetery.

Turkiye vowed on Sunday to investigate thoroughly anyone suspected of responsibility for the collapse of buildings in the earthquakes and has already ordered the detention of 113 suspects, Reuters reported.

Vice-President Fuat Oktay said overnight that 131 suspects had so far been identified as responsible for the collapse of some of the thousands of buildings flattened in the 10 provinces affected by the tremors.

Griffiths of the UN toured quake-hit areas of Kahramanmaras on Saturday. "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 said.

The UN has warned that at least 870,000 people urgently need hot meals across Turkiye and Syria.

Almost 26 million people have been affected by the earthquake, the World Health Organization said as it launched a flash appeal on Saturday for $42.8 million to cope with immediate, towering health needs.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first reported trip to affected areas since the quake, visiting hospitals in Aleppo on Friday and Latakia on Saturday, state media said, after approving deliveries of aid across the front lines of the civil war.

Turkiye's disaster agency said more than 32,000 people from Turkish organizations were working on search-and-rescue efforts. There were also 8,294 international rescuers.

The WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus took a flight full of emergency medical equipment into Aleppo on Saturday.

He toured damaged areas of the city and met two children who lost their parents in the earthquake. "There are no words to express the pain they are going through," he said.

Damascus said a convoy was expected to leave on Sunday. The transport ministry said 57 aid planes had landed in Syria last week.

The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged the Security Council to authorize the opening of new cross-border aid points between Turkiye and Syria. The council was due to meet to discuss Syria, possibly early this week.

Agencies via Xinhua