Around 45,000 people have died in Turkiye, Syria, and many more are still missing in collapsed apartments.

The earthquake that hit Syria and Turkiye has already claimed more than 45,000 lives, and the death toll is expected to rise given that 264,000 apartments in Turkiye were demolished and many people are still missing after the nation’s biggest contemporary calamity.

Three survivors were found in Turkiye on Friday, eleven days after the earthquake struck. Turkiye has recorded 39,672 fatalities, while Syria, a neighbouring country, has recorded more than 5,800. The death toll in Syria has not changed in days. The deceased in Turkey and Syria, many of whom were unable to get proper burial rites due to the magnitude of the calamity, were remembered in mosques around the world on Friday during prayers for absentee funerals.

Domestic teams continued to search through destroyed structures on Saturday in the hopes of discovering additional people who defied the odds, despite the fact that many international rescue teams had already left the enormous earthquake zone. According to experts, 24 hours after an earthquake is when most rescues take place.

The 40-year-old Hakan Yasinoglu was saved 278 hours after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake occurred on February 6 in the middle of the night in the southern province of Hatay, according to the Istanbul Fire Brigade. Earlier, the historic Turkish city of Antakya, formerly known as Antioch, saved Osman Halebiye, 14, and Mustafa Avci, 34. Avci was put on a video call with his parents while being transported away, and they showed him his newborn child.

“I had given up all hope totally. This truly is a miracle. They returned my son to me. His father remarked, “I saw the devastation and I felt nobody could be saved alive from there. Later, in a hospital in Mersin, a tired Avci was reunited with his wife Bilge and daughter Almile. According to aid organisations, the survivors will require assistance for months to come because so much essential infrastructure was destroyed.

The majority of fatalities in Syria’s neighbour, which has already been devastated by more than ten years of civil war, have occurred in the northwest, which is under the control of insurgents fighting President Bashar al-Assad. This conflict has complicated efforts to aid those who have been harmed by the earthquake.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday that the sides engaged in fighting for the first time since the disaster, with government forces bombing Atareb, a rebel-held town that was severely damaged by the earthquake. Reuters was unable to independently confirm the claim. Hundreds of Syrians who had fled their country’s civil war to Turkiye have, for the time being at least, returned to their homes in the conflict area.