The death toll from the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6 surpassed 35,000 on Monday as the UN Security Council meets urgently behind closed doors in New York to discuss the humanitarian situation in Syria.
• Also read: “Dad, are we going to die?”: In Turkey, the trauma of children who survived the earthquake
• Also read: Miraculous rescues a week after earthquakes in Turkey and Syria
• Also read: Earthquake: Assad ready to consider other crossing points for aid in north-west Syria
A glimmer of hope A week after the disaster, victims were still being found alive in the rubble in Turkey, and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said he had approved two new border crossings to bring aid into his country.
But the number of 7.8-magnitude earthquakes continues to grow and could even “double,” according to the UN: It totaled 35,331 dead as of Monday night — 31,643 dead in southern Turkey, according to Afad, Turkey’s public civil protection agency, while authorities have 3,688 Deaths counted in Syria.
“72,663 people may have died and 193,399 people may have been injured,” according to a report by the Turkonfed employers’ association published by Turkish media on Monday. The economic cost of the earthquake could reach “$84.1 billion,” according to the same source.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad asked for international help to rebuild parts of his country devastated by the earthquake during a meeting with UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths on Monday, the presidency announced.
Bashar al-Assad also told Mr Griffiths that he has agreed to open two new border crossings between Turkey and northwestern Syria for three months to provide humanitarian assistance to earthquake victims, UN Secretary-General Antonio Antonio said in a statement on Monday Guterres had announced a Security Council meeting.
“More help, faster”
The opening of the two new border crossings “will allow more aid to enter faster,” said Antonio Guterres.
“If the regime is serious, if the regime is willing to walk the talk, then that would be a good thing for the Syrian people,” US State Department spokesman Ned Price told the press.
Calls for opening other crossings had multiplied in recent days, and several members of the Security Council – United States, France, United Kingdom – had called for a resolution on the issue.
Martin Griffiths, who was on site in Turkey and Syria this weekend, has to present an assessment of the situation to the Council members during the closed Security Council meeting commissioned by Switzerland and Brazil.
“We have failed the people of northwestern Syria,” he admitted on Twitter. “They rightly feel let down” by the lack of humanitarian aid and the need to “correct this omission as soon as possible”.
Before the earthquake, almost all essential humanitarian aid for more than 4 million people living in the rebel-held areas of north-west Syria was transported from Turkey through the Bab al-Hawa border crossing in the north-west, which remains the only operational border crossing point to date.
Trucks, carrying enough on board to make shelters out of plastic sheeting, blankets, mattresses, rope, or even screws and nails, crossed the border.
“There was nothing I could do,” said Abdelbaset Khalil, a Syrian anesthesiologist from the city of Harim in the rebel-held province of Idlib on the border with Turkey, whose wife and two daughters were killed in the quake while he was already at work.
According to Suleiman Khalil, an official with the Syrian Ministry of Transport, 62 planes loaded with aid have landed in Syria so far and more are expected in the coming hours and days, particularly from Saudi Arabia.
In southern Turkey, where aid is now flowing, rescuers have pulled more survivors out of the rubble.
These rescues are unexpected as they took place well beyond the crucial 72-hour post-disaster period.
Seven survivors rescued
According to press reports, seven people were released alive in Turkey during the night from Sunday to Monday, including a three-year-old child in Kahramanmaras and a 60-year-old woman in Besni. Another, 40, was also rescued after 170 hours in Gaziantep.
A member of a UK rescue team posted video to Twitter on Sunday showing a rescuer walking through a tunnel dug in the ruins of the same town and retrieving a person who had been stranded for five days.
Overall, more than 34,000 people are still looking for survivors, said Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay.
But the hundreds of thousands of homeless must now become the priority.
Around 1.2 million people have been accommodated in student dormitories and 400,000 have been evacuated, Fuat Oktay added.
In Antakya, the Antioch of ancient Greece, after the first three or four days of abandonment, help is now being organized.
In Kahramanmaras, the epicenter of the earthquake, 30,000 tents have been erected, while 48,000 people are housed in schools and 11,500 in gyms, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu said.
A heavy police and military presence is now visible, the authorities specifying that it is to prevent looting following incidents this weekend.
Now aid is flowing in Antakya as in Kahramanmara, according to AFP teams.
At the same time, according to Turkish media, searches in Şanlıurfa, Kilis, Osmaniye and Adana were ended.
On the other hand, the interior minister noted, they continue in 308 places in Kahramanmaras.
Sudan said on Monday it had airlifted 30 tons of humanitarian aid to earthquake-hit Syria.