In Turkey, the death toll rose to 3,419 and 20,534 people injured, Vice President Fuat Oktay said on Tuesday.
In Syria, at least 1,602 people have died and 3,640 have been injured, according to estimates by the Damascus authorities and rescue teams in rebel areas.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan decreed a state of emergency for a period of three months in the ten southeastern provinces hit by the earthquake.
Based on the maps of the affected area, a person in charge of the World Health Organization (WHO), Adelheid Marschang, indicated that “23 million people are exposed” to the consequences of the earthquake, “including 5 million vulnerable people”. .
“It’s a race against time,” warned the director general of the institution, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Continue the search for survivors
Sometimes with bare hands, rescuers continued the dramatic search for survivors through the night, braving cold, rain or snow and the risk of further landslides.
In Jindires, a Syrian town on the border with Turkey, a newborn, still with the umbilical cord attached to her deceased mother, was found alive in the rubble of a building.
Further south, in Aleppo, Mahmud al Ali waits by a destroyed building. “My mother-in-law, my father-in-law and two of her children (are trapped),” he says. “We are sitting here in the cold and the rain, waiting for the rescuers to start digging.”
In Hatay, in southern Turkey, a 7-year-old girl was rescued alive after being trapped under a mountain of rubble. “Where is my mother?” said the little girl, in her dust-stained pink pajamas, in the arms of a lifeguard.