Up to 5.3 million people are at risk of becoming homeless in Syria after an earthquake devastated entire regions of the country and neighboring Turkey, a senior UN official warned on Friday, AFP and Agerpres reported.

“Up to 5.3 million people in Syria could be left homeless due to the earthquake,” Sivanka Dhanapala, a representative of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said at a press conference in Damascus. He clarified the figure, estimating it at 5.37 million people.

“It’s a huge number, and it’s for a population that has already been massively displaced” by the civil war that has gripped Syria since 2011, Dhanapala added.

“For Syria, this is a crisis within a crisis. (Syria has experienced) economic shocks, Covid and is now facing a harsh winter,” he recalled.

Survivors of a powerful earthquake that shook Syria and neighboring Turkey early Monday are being sent to camps built for people displaced by the war.

According to the latest official estimates, the 7.8-magnitude earthquake killed at least 23,000 people, more than 3,300 of them in Syria.