“It is now a race against time,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation, said in Geneva. “Every minute, every hour that passes, the chances of finding survivors get smaller.”
Throughout the region, rescue workers searched for survivors through the night and into the morning, as people waited in agony through the piles of rubble, hoping that friends and relatives might be found alive.
A woman’s cry for help was heard under a pile of rubble in the Turkish city of Antakya, the capital of Hatay province near the Syrian border. Reuters reporters saw the lifeless body of a small child lying nearby.
Crying in the rain, a resident who gave his name as Deniz was wringing his hands in despair.
“They are making noise but no one is coming,” he said. “We’re devastated, we’re devastated. My God…they’re calling out. They’re saying, ‘save us’ but we can’t save them. How are we going to save them? No.”
Families slept in cars that lined the streets.
Ayla, standing near a pile of rubble where an eight-story building was located, said she had left Gaziantep on Monday in search of her mother. Rescue workers from the Istanbul Fire Department were working in the rubble.
“No survivors yet,” he said.
Turkey’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) said 5,775 buildings were destroyed and 20,426 people were injured in the earthquake.