Increase number: Over 23 000 earthquake victims in Turkey and Syria

The search-saving teams made recent efforts during Thursday night to find survivors under the ruins of collapsed buildings.

Images taken by fear of heights showed the devastation left behind, with entire neighborhoods flat.

The new figures, which are growing daily, include over 19,88 people dead in Turkey and more than 3,500 in Syria now destroyed by civil war. Tens of thousands were also hurt.

While experts say that people can survive for a week or more, the chances of finding survivors in low temperatures are fading.

As emergency crews and relatives in panic dug through the rubble and occasionally found living people the focus began to shift to the decay of dangerous unstable structures.

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the “disaster of the century”.

In northwest Syria, at night on Thursday 9, the first UN trucks arrived since the earthquake occurred that entered Turkey's rebel-controlled area, underlining the difficulty of helping people there.

The death toll from Monday's 7.8-degree quake exceeded the death toll of more than 18,400 by the 2011 earthquake that caused a tsunami in Fukushima, Japan, and the 1999 earthquake near the Turkish capital, Istanbul, that killed about 18,000 people.