The United Nations has launched an appeal for donations to meet the "tremendous needs" of millions of people deprived of shelter, food and care after the earthquake, whose death toll in Turkey and Syria approached 40,000 on Wednesday.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged all member states to provide nearly $400 million "without delay" to guarantee "humanitarian aid which almost five million Syrians desperately need", starting with " shelter, medical care, food" for three months.
He said there should soon be a similar call for Turkey.
"The needs are immense" and "we all know that life-saving aid does not come in at the necessary speed and scale", insisted the Secretary General. "A week after the devastating earthquakes, millions of people across the region are struggling to survive, homeless and facing freezing temperatures," he added.
On Tuesday evening, the death toll from the earthquake stood at 39,106 - 35,418 officially in southern Turkey, while authorities counted 3,688 in Syria. On Sunday, the UN said it expected those numbers to increase significantly.
“We are witnessing the worst natural disaster in the WHO Europe region in a century and we are still measuring its magnitude,” said an official from the World Health Organization.
A rare cause for consolation for rescuers, four people were still able to be extracted alive from the rubble on Tuesday in Turkey.
Like this Syrian couple in Antakya, Antioch of antiquity, one of the Turkish cities most affected by the earthquake, who exclaimed "Allahu akbar!" ("Allah is the greatest"!) once saved, about 210 hours after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake on February 6, an AFP photographer testified.
Earlier, two younger brothers were also able to get out into the open after spending 198 hours trapped under rubble.
Aged 17 and 21 respectively, they said they survived by consuming protein powder.
"I was calm. I knew I would be saved. I prayed. It was possible to breathe under the ruins," said one of them, quoted by the NTV television channel.
But, despite these veritable little miracles, the chances of still finding survivors in the collapsed buildings become almost nil.
"The teams who came to search here clearly explained that they were looking for the living. They worked for two days without finding any," lamented for his part in Antakya a soldier soon to be in his fifties, Cengiz, whose five relatives are buried in the rubble.
"We understand that we favor living people, but we have the right to claim the remains of our loved ones," added, resigned, Husein, who hoped to find his brother's wife and their four children.
In these circumstances, the priority now is to care for the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people whose homes were destroyed by the earthquake.
"We have met the accommodation needs of 1.6 million people. Nearly 2.2 million have been evacuated or left the (affected) provinces voluntarily," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday. after a government meeting.
On the Syrian side, for the first time since 2020, a convoy carrying aid headed for the rebel areas in the north on Tuesday through the Bab al-Salama border post with Turkey, an AFP journalist saw. .
It consisted of 11 International Organization for Migration (IOM) trucks loaded with, among other things, tents, mattresses, blankets and mats.
The Bab al-Salama border crossing connects Turkish territory to the north of the province of Aleppo controlled by Syrian factions loyal to Ankara.
It had been closed to UN humanitarian aid under pressure from Russia, an ally of the Damascus regime.
Areas beyond the control of the latter in the north of the province of Aleppo and in that of Idleb (north-west), where nearly three million people live, are among the most devastated by the earthquake in Syria .
This country had previously announced the opening, for an initial period of three months, of two new crossing points with Turkey in order to speed up the arrival of humanitarian aid.
02/15/2023 11:59:15 - Bab al-Salama (Syrie) (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
