Two women survived for days under the rubble of the earthquake as the death toll reached 24,150

The death toll is 20,665 in Turkey and more than 3,500 in Syria. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people in the middle of winter. The first UN aid convoy enters northwestern Syria, coming from Turkey.

ANtakya, Turkey/Cenderes, Syria (Reuters) – Rescuers have pulled two women alive from the rubble of collapsed buildings after they were trapped for 122 hours in the aftermath of the region’s deadliest earthquake in two decades, Turkish authorities said on Saturday.

The death toll surpassed 24,150 in southern Turkey and northwestern Syria, a day after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the authorities should have responded faster to Monday’s massive earthquake.

Pictures from the state-run Anadolu news agency showed one of the rescued women, Meneks Tabak, 70, curled up in a blanket as rescuers carried her to a waiting ambulance in Kahramanmaras province.

The agency said the other is an injured 55-year-old named Mesal Cicek who was pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building in Diyarbakir, the largest city in southeastern Turkey.

Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay told reporters overnight in an effort that drew 31,000 rescuers across the affected area that 67 people had been scraped from under the rubble in the past 24 hours.

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He added that about 80,000 people are receiving treatment in hospitals, while 1.05 million people have become homeless due to the earthquakes, huddled in temporary shelters.

“Our main goal is to ensure that they return to normal life by providing them with permanent housing within one year, and that they treat their pain as soon as possible,” Oktay said.

With food unavailable for many in the bleak winter conditions, questions are growing for the two countries’ leaders about their response.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his first reported trip to affected areas since the earthquake, state media said, visiting a hospital in Aleppo with his wife Asma.

His government has agreed to deliver humanitarian aid across the front lines of the country’s 12-year civil war, a move that could speed aid to millions of desperate people.

Earlier, the World Food Program said it was running out of stocks in rebel-held northwest Syria as the war situation complicated relief efforts.

The earthquake, which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale, and several strong aftershocks across Turkey and Syria, is ranked as the seventh deadliest natural disaster this century, surpassing the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011, and approaching the 31,000 who died in an earthquake in neighboring Iran in 2011. 2003.

A similarly strong earthquake in northwest Turkey in 1999 killed more than 17,000 people in 1999.

On Friday, Erdogan visited the Turkish province of Adiyaman, where he acknowledged that the government’s response was not as fast as it could have been.

“Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, the reality is that search efforts are not as fast as we would like,” he said.

Opponents have seized on the issue to attack Erdogan, who is running for re-election in a vote set for May 14, though it may be delayed because of the disaster.

Growing anger over delays in delivering aid and starting rescue efforts is likely to play into the elections.

Even before the earthquake, the vote was seen as the biggest challenge to Erdogan’s power in two decades. He called for solidarity and condemned what he called “negative campaigns for political expediency”.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of Turkey’s main opposition party, criticized the government’s response.

“The earthquake was massive, but what was much bigger than the earthquake was the lack of coordination, lack of planning and incompetence,” he said in a statement.

The disaster management agency said deaths in Turkey rose to 20,665 on Saturday. In Syria, more than 3,500 people have been killed. Many of them are still under the rubble.

Hope among ruin

Teams from dozens of countries are among the rescuers toiling day and night through the rubble of thousands of wrecked buildings to free buried survivors.

In frigid temperatures, they regularly pleaded for silence as they strained to hear the sounds of life from the mounds of warped concrete.

In Turkey’s Samandağ region, rescuers crouched under concrete slabs whispering “Inshallah” – “God willing” – as they cautiously reached the rubble and pulled out a 10-day-old baby.

His eyes wide open, baby Yagiz Ulas was wrapped in a thermal blanket and taken to a field hospital. Video images showed his mother, dazed and pale but conscious, was taken away by emergency workers on a stretcher.

Additional reporting by Umit Bektas in Antakya, Orhan Coskun in Ankara, Ece Toksabay and Hüseyin Hayatsefer in Adana, Jonathan Spicer, Darren Butler, Yesim Dikman and Ali Kucukokmen in Istanbul, by Alistair Bell and Clarence Fernandez; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel, Rosalba O’Brien and William Mallard

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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