Turkey-Syria earthquake latest: death toll passes 24,000 as calls for aid intensify | Turkey-Syria earthquake 2023

Adem Altan can’t compare the picture he took on a cold morning this week with any of the tens of thousands he has shot in his 41 years as a photojournalist.

Shortly after driving from Ankara to the southern Turkish town of Kahramanmaraş on Tuesday, and picking his way through the aftermath of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake, he came across a collapsed apartment complex.

Families were digging through the rubble in search of their buried loved ones, but it was a man in an orange coat who sat quietly amid the debris who caught Altan’s eye.

“When I looked closer, I saw that he was holding a hand,” says the photographer, “so I began to take photographs.”

The man was called Mesut Hançer and the hand he was holding was that of his 15-year-old daughter, Irmak, who had been killed in her bed when the quake brought the building down. Hançer spotted Altan. And then he asked him to carry on.

Read on here:

The death toll in Turkey from this week’s devastating earthquakes has risen to 20,665, the country’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (Afad) said on Saturday.

It said that nearly 93,000 victims have been evacuated from the quake zone in southern Turkey and that more than 166,000 personnel were involved in the rescue and relief efforts.

There have been 1,891 aftershocks since the first quake early on Monday, it added.

Good morning and welcome to our ongoing live coverage of the fallout from the earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria on Monday.

The confirmed death toll now stands at 24,208. Officials and medics said 20,665 people had died in Turkey and 3,553 in Syria.

Rescue efforts are continuing in freezing conditions as hopes of finding more survivors are fading.

Here are the other most recent developments:

• Rescuers continued to pull survivors – including a newborn baby – from the rubble 100 hours after an earthquake. In Samandağ in Turkey’s southern Hatay province, a 10-day-old boy named Yagiz was retrieved from a ruined building overnight, while in Kırıkhan, German rescuers pulled 40-year-old Zeynep Kahraman alive out of the rubble more than 104 hours after she was buried and carried her to a waiting ambulance.

• At least 870,000 people urgently needed food in the two countries after the quake, which has made up to 5.3 million people homeless in Syria alone, the UN warned.

• The UN’s rights chief called for an immediate ceasefire in Syria so aid could reach all victims of the earthquake. Four million people in the rebel-held north-west rely on humanitarian aid but there have been no aid deliveries from government-controlled areas in three weeks.

• The Syrian government said it had approved the delivery of humanitarian aid to quake-hit areas outside its control. A decade of civil war and Syrian-Russian aerial bombardment had already destroyed hospitals and prompted electricity and water shortages.

• The International Organization for Migration said on Friday the 14 aid trucks bound for north-west Syria were carrying desperately needed heaters, tents, blankets and other supplies. This is an area where civil war has left 90% of the population – about 4 million people – relying on aid even before the quakes struck.

• The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, conceded for the first time on Friday that his government was not able to reach and help the victims “as quickly as we had desired”.

  Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report