London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Thursday, Oct 30, 2025

Death toll tops 23,700 as Turkey, Syria rescue efforts continue

Death toll tops 23,700 as Turkey, Syria rescue efforts continue

Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said earthquake rescue efforts ‘not as fast as we wanted them to be’.


The confirmed death in Turkey and northwest Syria from the region’s deadliest earthquake in 20 years stands at more than 24,000, five days after it hit, according to officials.

Casualties from the 7.8 magnitude earthquake, which struck in the early hours on Monday, as well as several powerful aftershocks, have surpassed the more than 17,000 killed in 1999 when a similarly powerful earthquake hit northwest Turkey.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan acknowledged during a visit to Adiyaman province on Friday that the government’s response could have been better.

“Although we have the largest search and rescue team in the world right now, it is a reality that search efforts are not as fast as we wanted them to be,” he said.

Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar said rescue teams had become “frantic” as hope for finding survivors dimmed with each passing hour.

Rescuers were “digging into the rubble and hoping to find some people dead or alive because now it has been more than 96 hours and the hopes here are fading”, he said, standing in front of a collapsed block of buildings in Kahramanmaras in southern Turkey, close to the epicentre of the first magnitude 7.8 earthquake.

“The families are here, waiting anxiously,” he added. “The scale of devastation is beyond imagination.”

Some time later, rescuers managed to dig out a man alive from under the rubble 110 hours since the earthquake struck, Serdar said.




Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from the Turkish city of Gaziantep, said entire families have been lost.

“We were talking to a woman here. She said ‘I have four of my brothers, my mother, my cousins and all of her nieces and nephews … all gone in an instant when the building just completely pancaked upon itself.”

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, criticised the government’s response.

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

With anger simmering over delays in the delivery of aid and getting the rescue effort under way, the disaster is likely to play into Erdogan’s bid for reelection, with the vote scheduled for May 14. The election may now be postponed due to the disaster.


‘We cannot cope’


The number of deaths in Turkey rose to 20,665 on Friday, the country’s health minister said. In Syria, more than 3,500 have been killed. Many more people remain under rubble.

In Syria, the government on Friday approved humanitarian aid deliveries across the front lines of the country’s 12-year war, a move that could speed up the arrival of help for millions of desperate people.

The World Food Programme said earlier it was running out of stocks in rebel-held northwest Syria as the state of war complicated relief efforts.




Dr Mohamed Alabrash, a general surgeon at the Central Hospital of Idlib in northwestern Syria, issued an urgent appeal for assistance.

“We face a shortage of medication and instruments,” he told Al Jazeera. “The hospital is full of patients, and so is the intensive care unit.”

“We cannot cope with this huge number of patients. The patients’ injuries are very heavy, and we need more support.”

The doctor said medical workers at the facility were under extreme pressure, working around the clock.

“All medical staff are working for 24 hours and we’ve consumed all the materials that we have, from medication to ICU materials,” Alabrash said, adding that the hospital’s generators were almost out of fuel.


Hope amid the ruins


Rescuers, including teams from dozens of countries, toiled night and day in the ruins of thousands of wrecked buildings to find buried survivors. In freezing temperatures, they regularly called for silence as they listened for any sound of life from mangled concrete mounds.

In Turkey’s Samandag district, rescuers crouched under concrete slabs whispering “Inshallah” (God willing) and carefully reached into the rubble to pick out a 10-day-old baby.

His eyes wide open, baby Yagiz Ulas was wrapped in a thermal blanket and carried to a field hospital. Emergency workers also took away his mother, dazed and pale but conscious on a stretcher, video images showed.

Across the border in Syria, rescuers from the White Helmets group used their hands to dig through plaster and cement until they reached the bare foot of a young girl, still wearing pink pyjamas, grimy but alive.

But hopes were fading that many others would be found alive.




In the Syrian town of Jandaris, Naser al-Wakaa sobbed as he sat on the pile of rubble and twisted metal that had been his family’s home, burying his face in the baby clothes that had belonged to one of his children.

“Bilal, oh Bilal,” he wailed, shouting the name of one of his dead children.

The head of Turkey’s Humanitarian Relief Foundation, Bulent Yildirim, went to Syria to see the impact there. “It was as if a missile has been dropped on every single building,” he said.

Some 24.4 million people in Syria and Turkey have been affected, according to Turkish officials and the United Nations, in an area spanning roughly 450km (280 miles) from Adana in the west to Diyarbakir in the east.

In Syria, people were killed as far south as Hama, 250km (155 miles) from the epicentre.

Hundreds of thousands more people have been left homeless and short of food in bleak winter conditions and leaders in both countries have faced questions about their response.

Many people have set up shelters in supermarket car parks, mosques, roadsides or amid the ruins. Many survivors are desperate for food, water and heat.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
UK and Vietnam Sign Landmark Migration Deal to Fast-Track Returns of Irregular Arrivals
UK Drug-Pricing Overhaul Essential for Life-Sciences Ambition, Says GSK Chief
Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie Temporarily Leave the UK Amid Their Parents’ Royal Fallout
UK Weighs Early End to Oil and Gas Windfall Tax as Reeves Seeks Investment Commitments
UK Retail Inflation Slows as Shop Prices Fall for First Time Since Spring
Next Raises Full-Year Profit Guidance After Strong Third-Quarter Performance
Reform UK’s Lee Anderson Admits to 'Gaming' Benefits System While Advocating Crackdown
United States and South Korea Conclude Major Trade Accord Worth $350 Billion
Hurricane Melissa Strikes Cuba After Devastating Jamaica With Record Winds
Vice President Vance to Headline Turning Point USA Campus Event at Ole Miss
U.S. Targets Maritime Narco-Routes While Border Pressure to Mexico Remains Limited
Bill Gates at 70: “I Have a Real Fear of Artificial Intelligence – and Also Regret”
Elon Musk Unveils Grokipedia: An AI-Driven Alternative to Wikipedia
Saudi Arabia Unveils Vision for First-Ever "Sky Stadium" Suspended Over Desert Floor
Amazon Announces 14 000 Corporate Job Cuts as AI Investment Accelerates
UK Shop Prices Fall for First Time Since March, Food Leads the Decline
London Stock Exchange Group ADR (LNSTY) Earns Zacks Rank #1 Upgrade on Rising Earnings Outlook
Soap legend Tony Adams, long-time star of Crossroads, dies at 84
Rachel Reeves Signals Tax Increases Ahead of November Budget Amid £20-50 Billion Fiscal Gap
NatWest Past Gains of 314% Spotlight Opportunity — But Some Key Risks Remain
UK Launches ‘Golden Age’ of Nuclear with £38 Billion Sizewell C Approval
UK Announces £1.08 Billion Budget for Offshore Wind Auction to Boost 2030 Capacity
UK Seeks Steel Alliance with EU and US to Counter China’s Over-Capacity
UK Struggles to Balance China as Both Strategic Threat and Valued Trading Partner
Argentina’s Markets Surge as Milei’s Party Secures Major Win
British Journalist Sami Hamdi Detained by U.S. Authorities After Visa Revocation Amid Israel-Gaza Commentary
King Charles Unveils UK’s First LGBT+ Armed Forces Memorial at National Memorial Arboretum
At ninety-two and re-elected: Paul Biya secures eighth term in Cameroon amid unrest
Racist Incidents Against UK Nurses Surge by 55%
UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves Cites Shared Concerns With Trump Administration as Foundation for Early US-UK Trade Deal
Essentra plc: A Closer Look at a UK ‘Penny Stock’ Opportunity Amid Market Weakness
U.S. and China Near Deal to Avert Rare-Earth Export Controls Ahead of Trump-Xi Summit
Justin time: Justin Herbert Shields Madison Beer with Impressive Reflex at Lakers Game
Russia’s President Putin Declares Burevestnik Nuclear Cruise Missile Ready for Deployment
Giuffre’s Memoir Alleges Maxwell Claimed Sexual Act with Clooney
House Republicans Move to Strip NYC Mayoral Front-Runner Zohran Mamdani of U.S. Citizenship
Record-High Spoiled Ballots Signal Voter Discontent in Ireland’s 2025 Presidential Election
Philippines’ Taal Volcano Erupts Overnight with 2.4 km Ash Plume
Albania’s Virtual AI 'Minister' Diella Set to 'Birth' Eighty-Three Digital Assistants for MPs
Tesla Unveils Vision for Optimus V3 as ‘Biggest Product of All Time’, Including Surgical Capabilities
Francis Ford Coppola Auctions Luxury Watches After Self-Financed Film Flop
Convicted Sex Offender Mistakenly Freed by UK Prison Service Arrested in London
United States and China Begin Constructive Trade Negotiations Ahead of Trump–Xi Summit
U.S. Treasury Sanctions Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro over Drug-Trafficking Allegations
Miss USA Crowns Nebraska’s Audrey Eckert Amid Leadership Overhaul
‘I Am Not Done’: Kamala Harris Signals Possible 2028 White House Run
NBA Faces Integrity Crisis After Mass Arrests in Gambling Scandal
Swift Heist at the Louvre Sees Eight French Crown Jewels Stolen in Under Seven Minutes
U.S. Halts Trade Talks with Canada After Ontario Ad Using Reagan Voice Triggers Diplomatic Fallout
Microsoft AI CEO: ‘We’re making an AI that you can trust your kids to use’ — but can Microsoft rebuild its own trust before fixing the industry’s?
×