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ANKARA: The death toll from last week's massive earthquake in Turkiye and Syria rose to more than 35,000 on Monday, as rescue teams started to wind up the search for survivors and the aid effort shifted to hundreds of thousands of people made homeless. One week after the 7.8-magnitude tremor, Turkish media reported a handful of people were still being pulled from the rubble and increasingly desperate conditions for survivors battling lack of hygiene, toilets and water. The confirmed death toll surged to 35,224 as officials and medics said 31,643 people had died in Turkiye and at least 3,581 in Syria after the February 6 quake, the fifth deadliest since the beginning of the 21st century. The United Nations (UN) has decried the failure to ship desperately needed aid to war-torn regions of Syria and warned that the toll is set to rise higher as experts caution that hopes for finding people alive dim with each passing day. "I could not do anything," said Syrian nurse anesthetist Abdelbaset Khalil whose wife and two daughters were killed by the earthquake while he was already at work. "Send any stuff you can as there are millions of people here and they all need to be fed," appealed Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu late Sunday. While hundreds of rescue teams were still busy in rescue operations, efforts had ended in seven parts of the quake-hit province, he added. An AFP reporter said that in Antakya, clean-up rescue teams started to evacuate rubble and erect toilets as the telephone network started to resume in parts of the town. The city was patrolled by a strong military and police presence which authorities deployed to prevent looting following several incidents over the weekend. Hatice Goz, a volunteer psychologist in Turkiye's Hatay province, said she has been fielding "a barrage of calls" from frantic parents looking for missing children. Turkish Vice President Mr. Fuat Oktay late Sunday said over 108,000 buildings were damaged across the quake-hit region with 1.2 million people being housed in student accommodation and around 400,000 people evacuated from the affected region. Aid packages, mainly clothes and food, were opened and spread across the streets in the province of Hatay, according to NTV. One video showed aid workers randomly throwing clothes into a crowd as people tried to grab whatever they could. Quake victims await aid supplies On Monday, the UN's relief chief Martin Griffiths visited Aleppo, where more than 200,000 people have been left homeless by the earthquake, according to the WHO. A convoy with aid supplies for northwest Syria arrived via Turkiye, but Griffiths said more was needed for millions whose homes were destroyed. In Syria the toll has not changed for several days and is expected to rise. "We have so far failed the affected people in northwest Syria. They rightly feel abandoned after the quake. Looking for international assistance that has not arrived," Griffiths tweeted on Sunday. "Our focus now is on helping the Syrian people," said UN envoy Geir Pedersen in Damascus. A 10-truck UN convoy has crossed into northwest Syria via the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, according to an AFP correspondent, carrying shelter kits, rope, blankets, plastic sheeting, mattresses and carpets. Bab al-Hawa crossing is the only point for international aid supplies to reach people in Syria after around 12 years of civil war, after other border crossings were closed under pressure from Russia and China. The head of the World Health Organization met Assad in Damascus on Sunday and said the Syrian leader had voiced readiness for more border crossings to help bring aid into the rebel-held northwest. – AFP

Search for Quake Survivors Slows as Turkiye-Syria Death Toll Passes 35,000
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