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

The death toll among Palestinians as a result of the devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria has risen to 89, after a family of five were found dead under the rubble in the Turkish city of Antakya, the official Palestinian news agency WAFA said.

The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said it expects the number of casualties to increase as more bodies are being found under the rubble in the affected areas. It said 38 victims were confirmed in Turkey and 51 Palestinian refugees in Syria.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has said it sent a team to provide mental health support to earthquake victims in Syrian shelters.

“Among the tens of thousands of victims of the devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria, hundreds of children are languishing in hospitals and shelters without their families and homes,” read a statement issued by the group.

“Children have been going through difficult ordeals since the earthquake struck. Some of them miraculously escaped death, but after their physical survival, psychological support teams of the Palestine Red Crescent are working for their psychological survival,” the statement continued.

Turkey’s Hatay Airport, located in one of the hardest-hit provinces, has resumed operations, Turkey’s Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure has said.

“We quickly repaired the damage on the Hatay Airport runway. Our airport started to operate today,” the ministry said on its official Twitter page, sharing before and after images of the airport’s runway.

In Antakya, residents and aid workers who came from other cities have cited worsening security conditions, with widespread accounts of businesses and collapsed homes being looted.

Some residents who were left homeless by the earthquake and are now sleeping in their cars or tents have said their valuable belongings including gold have been stolen.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the government would deal firmly with looters, noting that a state of emergency had been declared. Under a presidential decree, the detention period for looters has been lengthened to four days from one.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said on Sunday that 57 people had been arrested for looting.

Doha will send Turkey and Syria 10,000 cabins and caravans used during the FIFA World Cup, Qatari officials have said.

“In view of the urgent needs in Turkey and Syria, we have taken the decision to ship our cabins and caravans to the region, providing much-needed and immediate support to the people of Turkey and Syria,” a Qatari official told AFP.

The mobile homes were used for a few weeks when Qatar hosted the football World Cup last year. Officials indicated after the tournament that they would be donated.

The first shipment is set to leave Doha port for Turkey on Monday, with further deliveries expected in the coming days, the officials said.

The WHO chief has said that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad voiced openness to more border crossings for aid to be brought to quake victims in rebel-held northwestern Syria.

World Health Organization Director-GeneralTedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters he had met with the Syrian president in Damascus on Sunday afternoon to discuss the response to the devastating earthquake that has killed more than 33,000 people across Syria and Turkey.

Rebel-held areas in northwestern Syria, which has been ravaged by more than a decade of civil war, are in a particularly dire situation.

They cannot receive aid from government-held parts of Syria without Damascus’s authorisation, and the single border crossing open to shuttle aid from Turkey saw operations damaged in the quake.

Mourners from a town in Northern Cyprus have buried the last of 39 people, including 24 children, who were killed in last week’s earthquake while in Turkey for a school volleyball tournament.

The children aged 11 to 14 – along with four teachers, 10 parents and one trainer – were killed when their hotel in the southeastern city of Adiyaman collapsed, burying them under mounds of rubble.

The team from Turkish Maarif College in Famagusta, in Turkish Cypriot-controlled Northern Cyprus, had travelled to Adiyaman for a match together with their trainers, teachers and parents.

They were caught in the devastating quake that hit southern Turkey and Syria in the early hours last Monday.

A 30-tonne shipment of humanitarian aid from the Italian government – including four ambulances and 13 pallets of medical equipment – has landed in Beirut en route to Damascus in the first European earthquake relief to Syria.

The European Union’s envoy to Syria, Dan Stoenescu, said the EU was encouraging member states to provide help and that sanctions “do not impede the delivery of humanitarian aid”.

But he said the EU was seeking “sufficient safeguards” to ensure that help provided would reach vulnerable people, adding the Syrian government had a “record of aid diversion”.

“We call the authorities in Damascus not to politicise the humanitarian aid delivery, and to engage in good faith with all humanitarian partners and UN agencies to help people,” Stoenescu said.

The earthquake hit as Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for June. Even before the disaster, his popularity had been falling due to soaring inflation and a slumping Turkish currency.

Some affected by the quake and opposition politicians have accused the government of slow and inadequate relief efforts early on, and critics have questioned why the army, which played a key role after a 1999 earthquake, was not brought in sooner.

Erdogan has acknowledged problems, such as the challenge of delivering aid despite damaged transport links, but said the situation had been brought under control. He has called for solidarity and condemned “negative” politicking.

Recent earthquakes have destroyed more than 115 schools in Syria and damaged hundreds more, according to a United Nations update, Reuters reports.

More than 100 other schools were being used as makeshift shelters to host thousands displaced by the earthquake, which brought apartment blocks and even tiny rural homes crashing down on residents’ heads.

As despair has bred rage at the agonisingly slow rescue efforts after recent earthquakes, the focus has turned to assigning blame.

Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said 131 people are under investigation for their alleged responsibility in the construction of buildings that failed to withstand the quakes.

While the quakes were powerful, victims, experts and people across Turkey are blaming faulty construction for multiplying the devastation.

Turkey’s construction codes meet current earthquake-engineering standards, at least on paper, but they are rarely enforced, explaining why thousands of buildings toppled over or pancaked down onto the people inside.

Among those facing scrutiny were two people arrested in Gaziantep province on suspicion of having cut down columns to make extra room in a building that collapsed, said the state-run news outlet Anadolu Agency.

Earthquakes in Turkey earlier this week rank among the world’s largest continental quakes ever recorded, according to a Canadian seismologist.

Speaking to the Anadolu news agency, Edwin Nissen, a professor of seismology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said last Monday’s temblors in Turkey and Syria are among the top five or 10 continental quakes ever recorded.

“What makes it so damaging is the combination of its magnitude and its location and a densely populated part of Turkey and obviously bordering with a densely populated part of Syria,” he explained.

Saying that actually the largest earthquakes normally occur in the oceans, Nissen underlined, however, that these quakes were less powerful than continental earthquakes.

Aid groups and public health experts warn that a series of devastating earthquakes could exacerbate a cholera outbreak in Syria first detected last year.

The warnings come as rescue operations ceased in both opposition and government-held portions of Syria – and hope diminished amid remaining searches in Turkey – six days after a series of quakes hit the region.

Across war-torn Syria, where the United Nations has estimated that 5.3 million people have been left homeless by the disaster, “there was a perfect storm brewing before the earthquake – of increasing food insecurity, collapsing healthcare systems, the lack of access to safe water and poor sanitation”, said Eva Hines, chief of communications for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the Syrian capital, Damascus.

Read more here.

Serizan Agbas, 61, has been sleeping in a chair in the garden of a school since the earthquakes devastated the southeastern region of Turkey on February 6.

Agbas’s apartment block is still standing but was deemed not safe to provide shelter. So she stays out in the open and shares fire and food with rescuers.

“Our pain is immense. I have only 15 lira [$0.80] in my pocket, I don’t even have a cigarette,” she told Al Jazeera. “I have nothing to lose now, so I’m not afraid.”

Read more here.

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 al-Assad’s regime and has openly been fighting alongside his forces since April 2013.

Hundreds of men were moving around in an open field in Jandaris, northwestern Syria. They seemed hard at work, lifting, calling out to each other, and carrying things around.

Upon closer inspection, the grim reality was revealed: The field was a cemetery which had not been much in use before the devastating earthquakes that hit southern Turkey and northwestern Syria last week.

Now, it had become the site of mass graves, long trenches dug to inter hundreds of people who died in the quakes and their aftermath.

Read more here.

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,” al-Assad said during a meeting in Damascus with Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.