Hope, heartbreak as children pulled from rubble

A photograph of a father holding the hand of his teenage daughter who died trapped under the rubble of a flattened building in the Turkish region of Kahramanmaras conveys the scale of the suffering provoked by Monday’s magnitude 7.8 earthquake and its aftershocks.

Sitting amid the rubble, Mesut Hancer held on to his 15-year-old daughter’s hand which was all that showed from under the slabs of concrete piled above her lifeless body. Nearby, rescuers manually worked through the ruins.

It is just one of a number of harrowing images that have emerged of some of the millions of children caught in the catastrophic earthquake in Turkey and Syria, which was followed by a second magnitude 7.6 earthquake hours later and more than 100 aftershocks.

Rescue efforts are ongoing, with moments of hope in the midst of the disaster.

A one-year-old baby was found alive yesterday in the Turkish province of Sanliurfa after spending 53 hours trapped under a collapsed five-storey building, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency reported.

A mother and her two-year-old daughter were rescued in Iskenderun nearly 44 hours after the first tremor hit the Hatay province, which was among the most affected.

In the city of Kahramanmaras, Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar detailed how rescuers saved a 14-year-old girl who was trapped under the rubble for more than 40 hours.

“When the rescue team took her out, the first thing that she said was, ‘Please save my father as well.’

Her father was very close to her and he was also alive. Later, during the night, her father was also pulled out from the rubble, but two of the other family members, unfortunately, could not survive,” Serdar said.

The rescued are the fortunate ones as the UN on tuesday said thousands of children might have died in the disaster that struck when people were speeling.

UNICEF said the images of so many children being caught up in the disaster were “heart-wrenching”.