Rescue efforts for survivors come to an end today in earthquake-hit Turkey, as many now pray that the bodies of their loved ones can be found so they can be buried.

“If I prayed to find a dead person? Yes (…) we must hand over his body to the family,” excavator operator Akin Bozkurt said as he cleared debris from a damaged building in the city of Kahramanmaras.

“When you pull a body out from under a ton of rubble, families wait with hope,” Bozkurt continued. “They want to have a funeral. They need a grave.”

According to Islamic tradition, the dead should be buried as soon as possible.

The head of Turkey’s AFAD disaster relief agency, Yunus Sezer, said that search and rescue operations will largely end tonight.

The earthquake that occurred on February 6 in Turkey and Syria claimed the lives of more than 46,000 people. The death toll is expected to rise significantly as some 345,000 apartments are now known to have been destroyed in the country and many people are still missing.

Neither Turkey nor Syria have announced how many people have gone missing since the earthquake.

In one of the latest attempts to pull survivors out of the rubble, 12 days after the deadly earthquake, rescue teams began manually clearing rubble at the site of rescue operations last Saturday night in Antioch.

According to rescuers, trained dogs and thermal imaging cameras found signs of life in two people, but shortly after midnight, eight hours after attempts to extract them began, rescuers stopped rescue efforts.

“No one is alive,” said AFAD member Mujdat Erdogan, his uniform and face covered in dust. “I don’t believe we can save people anymore.”

A group from Kyrgyzstan tried to rescue a Syrian family of five from the ruins of a building in Antioch, southern Turkey.

Three people, including a child, were recovered alive from the rubble. According to rescuers, the mother and father survived, but the child later died of dehydration. His older sister and twin brother also did not survive.

Millions of people need help

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that around 26 million people in Turkey and Syria are in need of humanitarian assistance.

The US Secretary of State is expected to visit Turkey today to discuss how Washington can further assist Ankara in its efforts to deal with the worst natural disaster in its modern history.

In Syria, which has reported more than 5,800 deaths, the UN World Food Program (WFP) has announced that authorities in the country’s northwest are blocking access to the area.

“It complicates our work. This must be resolved immediately,” WFP Director David Beasley said on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

Most of the casualties in Syria are in the northwest, an area controlled by rebels who are fighting forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“Time is running out and our money is running out. It’s costing our business about $50 million a month just for our response to the earthquake, so if Europe doesn’t want another wave of refugees, we need the support we need,” Beasley said.

Thousands of Syrians who fled to Turkey to escape their country’s civil war have returned to their homes in the war zone – at least for now.

Source: APE-ME, REUTERS