Turkey-Syria earthquake live news: Death toll goes past 33,000

Lebanon’s powerful movement Hezbollah sent a convoy of 23 trucks carrying food and medical aid to Syria’s quake-stricken province of Latakia, a stronghold of the group’s allies.

“This the moment of support, the moment of assistance,” senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine told reporters in Lebanon’s capital Beirut.

Latakia, located in Syria’s northwestern region, is a stronghold for President Bashar al-Assad.

The Iran-backed Hezbollah is a key ally of Assad’s regime and has openly been fighting alongside his forces since April 2013.

Turkey’s disaster management authority says the death toll from Monday’s Turkey-Syria earthquakes has passed 30,000, with the United Nations warning that the final number may double.

Officials and medics said 29,605 people had died in Turkey and 3,574 in Syria from the 7.8-magnitude tremor, bringing the confirmed total to 33,179.

Watch the moment rescuers save a little girl from under the rubble in Turkey’s Hatay province, 150 hours after a devastating earthquake caused the building to collapse on top of her.

Turkish authorities said they have arrested 48 people who were caught stealing and defrauding victims through telephone calls.

“The properties are under risk as well as the lives of those inhabitants in the region,” said Al Jazeera’s Sinem Koseoglu.

“Since yesterday, we have been seeing videos on social media. The local residents -earthquake survivors – and some security were beating some of the looters.”

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has thanked the United Arab Emirates for pledging tens of millions of dollars in aid to the quake-hit country, the presidency said in a statement.

“The UAE was among the first countries that stood with Syria and sent huge relief and humanitarian aid and search and rescue teams,” Assad said during a meeting in Damascus with Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

In Antakya, an Indian search and rescue team has recovered a body from under the rubble.

Indian search and rescue team in the Turkish city of Antakya have recovered a body from under the rubble [Patrick Keddie/Al Jazeera]

Meanwhile, aid provisions have been set up in the city, with workers providing water bottles, food, blankets, and diapers.

Relief efforts in central Antakya in Turkey [Patrick Keddi/A Jazeera]

Quake victims who have been dug out of the rubble are now being buried in mass graves in Turkey’s Hatay province.

One cotton field has been transformed into an ‘earthquake cemetery’, with numbers marking where the victims are laid to rest.

Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani left Doha on Sunday morning to meet Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to Qatar News Agency.

Erdogan welcomed Al Thani at Istanbul’s Vahdettin Palace, according to presidential sources who shared a photo of the leaders on Twitter.

The Qatari emir, who is the first head of state to pay a visit to Turkey after the deadly earthquakes, is accompanied by an official delegation.

President Erdogan (L) receives Qatar’s Emir Al Thani, in Ankara [Mustafa Kamaci/Anadolu Agency]

The chances of finding more survivors under the rubble of destroyed buildings are increasingly slim [Patrick Keddie/Al Jazeera]

Erdem Avsaoğlu’s sister, her husband, and their two children lived in this building in Antakya.

They were trapped but were still alive and could communicate with their family until a fire broke out on Tuesday night, after which the communication stopped.

“This is the seventh day now, everyone is tired, we just want to find the bodies in one piece. But we can’t find anything – probably they all got burned,” Erdem said.

Rescue and search teams gather around the building in Antakya where a family has been trapped underneath since Monday’s quake [Patrick Keddie/Al Jazeera]

Turkey has pledged to thoroughly investigate anyone suspected of responsibility for the collapse of buildings and has ordered the arrest of 113 suspects.

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 earthquakes on Monday.

“Detention orders have been issued for 113 of them,” Oktay told reporters in a briefing at the disaster management coordination center in Ankara.

“We will follow this up meticulously until the necessary judicial process is concluded, especially for buildings that suffered heavy damage and buildings that caused deaths and injuries.”

He said the justice ministry had established earthquake crimes investigation bureaus in the quake zone provinces to investigate deaths and injuries.

Dr. Evgenia Zelikova, a medical unit manager for Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF), told Al Jazeera that the first 48-72 hours after an earthquake is a crucial window for pulling out survivors from under the rubble.

“As time goes on there will be fewer cases of survival,” Zelikova said, speaking from the Jordanian capital, Amman. “Our teams working in northwest Syria at the hospitals started to see fewer and fewer cases of survivors after 72 hours.”

“Being under the cold weather for a long period of time is the biggest factor in losing blood and body temperature which will have consequences on the survival possibility,” she went on to say.

Zelikova said of primary concern health-wise is the epidemiological situation, the cold weather, the partially destroyed infrastructure, waterborne disease, access to healthcare for those with chronic diseases, and mental health.

“The Syrian population in the northwest is already at a high risk [of deteriorating mental health] because of the prolonged crisis and difficult conditions, and of course, such a traumatizing event can increase their vulnerability further,” she said.

Qatar has provided help to northwestern Syria’s aid group, the White Helmets, to support their earthquake search and rescue operations, the Qatar Fund for Development said.

The aid includes ambulance repairs and fuel to operate heavy vehicles, it added.

“The road ahead is long, but we can’t face this disaster without your help,” the White Helmets wrote on Twitter, thanking Qatar.

The White Helmets, a group of 3,000 volunteer rescuers, has sharply criticized the lack of aid reaching the opposition-held areas where they work.

On Saturday, the group said it had not rescued anyone since Thursday and that it was now working to remove the bodies from the rubble.

Germany has announced that people affected by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria will be allowed to stay temporarily with relatives living in the country.

“This is emergency aid,” German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser told the Bild newspaper. “We want to allow Turkish or Syrian families in Germany to bring their close relatives from the disaster area to their homes without bureaucracy.”

China has shipped 53 tonnes of tents to aid earthquake-hit Turkey, with more emergency aid planned in the near future, state broadcaster CCTV said.

The tents, sent from Shanghai, are scheduled to arrive in Istanbul later on Sunday, CCTV said.

The first batch of supplies from China – 40,000 blankets – arrived in Istanbul on Saturday, according to CCTV. It is planning to send medical equipment, including electrocardiogram machines, ultrasound diagnostic instruments, and medical vehicles and hospital beds soon, CCTV said.

About 1,100 bodies have so far been brought across the only border crossing between Turkey and opposition-held northwest Syria, officials who administer the Bab al-Hawa crossing said on Saturday.

They said they were working “around the clock” to deliver bodies from Turkey to Syria. Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees fled to the southern Turkish region hardest hit by the earthquake amid Syria’s ongoing civil war.

Bodies are transported across the Bab al-Hawa crossing [File: Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

Bodies are transported across the Bab al-Hawa crossing [File: Ali Haj Suleiman/Al Jazeera]

Greece’s foreign minister has arrived in Turkey in a show of support, despite a longstanding rivalry between the two NATO countries.

Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias met his Turkish counterpart, Mevlut Cavusoglu, according to footage on state-run ERT TV, before they boarded helicopters to quake-hit regions.

Dendias’s arrival marks the first visit by a European minister to Turkey since the earthquake.

The two ministers are traveling to Antakya, where Greek rescuers are helping with search and rescue operations.

Reporting from Antakya, Turkey, Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith says a public health crisis is looming in the devastation.

“One of the challenges is the government wants to move people from areas to stop a public health catastrophe, the air is thick with smoke and dust, there’s no sanitation, people are still buried under the rubble and are still sleeping out in the open,” he said.

“So they need to provide the tents. There are some tents, here on the outskirts of Antakya, that is, they are beginning to arrive but there still aren’t enough yet,” Smith said. “The government needs to get people out of this area and these areas so that they can start trying to rebuild and start trying to clear the debris but also so they can maintain public health.”

Cranes remove debris next to destroyed buildings in Antakya, southeastern Turkey [Hussein Malla/AP Photo]

A 35-year-old man has been rescued from under the rubble of a collapsed building in Hatay, Turkey, 149 hours after the earthquakes hit.

He was identified as Mustafa Sarıgul.

While rescue operations continued in southern Turkey, hopes of finding more survivors have dimmed.

Mustafa Sarigul, 35, is carried by rescuers [Mustafa Yılmaz/Anadolu Agency]

Mustafa Sarıgul being rescued from under the rubble [Mustafa Yılmaz/Anadolu]

Rescuers embrace each other after rescuing Mustafa Sarıgul [Mustafa Yılmaz/Anadolu]

As Turkey reels from its deadliest earthquake in decades, some residents of Istanbul have already turned their growing anxiety elsewhere – toward the next big quake.

“We live in distress,” said Aysegul Rahvanci, a lifetime Istanbul resident, of her fears about a possible strong earthquake in the city.

Turkey is prone to earthquakes as it lies in an area where several tectonic plates meet. Quakes usually occur along the boundaries between plates. The North Anatolian Fault, which divides the Eurasian and Anatolian plates, runs close to Istanbul.

Prior to Monday’s quakes, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake that hit the western part of Turkey’s Marmara region, where Istanbul is also located, in 1999 had been the deadliest in decades. That incident killed 17,500 people.

The European Union’s envoy to Syria says it is not fair to accuse the group of failing to provide enough help to Syrians following the devastating earthquake that hit swaths of Syria and Turkey.

“It is absolutely unfair to be accused of not providing aid, when actually we have constantly been doing exactly that for over a decade and we are doing so much more even during the earthquake crisis,” the head of the EU delegation, Dan Stoenescu, told Reuters news agency in written comments.

The Syrian government officially requested aid on Wednesday.

Al Jazeera’s Sinem Koseoglu says Turkey has experienced 2,356 tremors since Monday’s devastating earthquakes.

She says experts are calling for more quality control during the construction of buildings to reduce risks in the quake-prone region.

Watch her dispatch from the offices of Turkey’s AFAD agency in Ankara.

Nearly a week since the Turkey-Syria earthquakes, Hassan Guntekin continues to cling to the hope that his wife, three children and mother-in-law may still be alive under rubble in the Turkish city of Antakya.

“I need my three children to be rescued. Even if only one of my kids survives, it will be a hope for me to continue living,” he told Al Jazeera. “Otherwise, there is no point to keep on living. I don’t know what I will do. Who will call me dad during Eid?”

The Antakya resident said the Turkish government has “failed” in its response to the quakes.

“They are so disorganized and can’t work at all. It is the sixth day and every day two different teams take part in the rescue,” he said.

“I haven’t seen any officials here, neither from the government nor from the mayor’s office. I don’t want to see them anyway. They don’t come here because they know we don’t want to see them.”

Members of a Greek rescue team work at the site of a collapsed building in Hatay, Turkey February 11, 2023 [Kemal Aslan/ Reuters]

Rescuers pulled a seven-month-old baby and a teenage girl from the rubble, nearly a week after earthquakes devastated southeastern Turkey.

The infant was rescued in the city of Hatay more than 140 hours after the quake, state media reported, while Esma Sultan, 13, was pulled from the rubble of a building in the city of Gaziantep.

In the city of Kahramanmaras – the epicenter of Monday’s 7.8-magnitude tremor – a 70-year-old woman was also saved.

“Is the world there?” Menekse Tabak asked as she was pulled out from the concrete to applause and cries praising God, according to a video on state broadcaster TRT Haber.

UN relief chief Martin Griffith says the death toll from the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria could “double or more” from its current levels.

Commenting on the number of deaths, he told Sky News: “I think it is difficult to estimate precisely as we need to get under the rubble but I’m sure it will double or more.”

“We haven’t really begun to count the number of dead,” he said.

Officials and medics said 24,617 people were killed in Turkey and more than 3,500 in Syria. The confirmed total now stands at more than 28,000.

Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay says at least 24,617 people have been killed in the deadly quakes that struck southeastern Turkey.

Earlier, Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) said some 80,278 people have been injured.