A family of five were rescued alive from beneath rubble in Turkey after spending five days beneath their collapsed home following a major earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
Rescue workers first extricated mother and daughter Havva and Fatmagul Aslan from among a mound of debris in the hard-hit town of Nurdagi, in Gaziantep province, HaberTurk reported.
Then they miraculously reached the father, Hasan Aslan, but he insisted that his other daughter, Zeynep, and son Saltik Bugra be saved first.
The rescues bring the total number of people rescue today to 12, despite diminishing hopes amid freezing temperatures and the death toll tragically passes 25,000.
The death toll from the earthquake is likely to “more than double”, according to a UN emergency relief coordinator.
Members of the search teams embraced each other, with one of them calling out: "He is out, brother. He is out. He is here."
Monday's 7.8-magnitude quake collapsed thousands of buildings, injuring 80,000 and leaving millions homeless. Another quake nearly equal in power and likely triggered by the first caused more destruction hours later.
Even though experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the odds of finding more survivors are quickly waning.
Today, the Syrian Civil Defence announced they had all but given up finding people alive under the rubble, and have now shifted efforts toward "rebuilding and recovery."
Rescuers in Turkey were also shifting to thermal cameras to help identify life amid the rubble, a sign of the weakness of any remaining survivors.
A large makeshift graveyard was under construction on the outskirts of Antakya on Saturday, with an anonymous worker from Turkey's Ministry of Religious Affairs saying that around 800 bodies were brought the cemetery on Friday alone.
Clashes between unidentified groups have been reported in Turkey, prompting Austrian troops to suspend rescue operations and shelter in a base camp with other international organisations, Agence France-Presse reported.
Elsewhere, 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.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said universities would switch to long-distance education until the summer, to free up state-run dormitories for survivors left homeless.
He also conceded ,for the first time, that his government was not able to reach and help the victims “as quickly as we had desired”.
The U.N. refugee agency estimated that as many as 5.3 million people have been left homeless in Syria.
Once recognisable landmarks are now lost, replaced by the remnants of destruction and despair.
