![]() “Without an urgent injection of money, existing humanitarian programs will be impacted as already overstretched funding is strained further.” “We’ve been scaling up our response to support the increasing number of children in need, delivering health, nutrition, education, child protection, shelter, water, sanitation and hygiene, and food security and livelihoods support … but (international) donors must provide lifesaving humanitarian assistance.” “Even before this disaster, Afghan children were already suffering from a devastating lack of food.” “This is a crisis on top of a crisis,” said Save the Children’s Afghanistan director Arshad Malik. ![]() Save the Children said the scale of the damage in Herat was “horrific” and anticipates the death toll will rise as bodies are pulled from the rubble. “The international community should not, and cannot, look away from children in Afghanistan, especially now, when help is needed most.” “Afghanistan is home to one of the world’s worst humanitarian and child rights crises,” he said. Lack of water is also a serious challenge, Ibrahim added, with women and children being the most disproportionately affected. ![]() “This is by far the worst earthquake Afghanistan has endured in many years,” Siddig Ibrahim, UNICEF Afghanistan’s Chief of Field Office, told CNN. Teams are also conducting additional assessments on the ground and are providing emergency drugs and tents for overburdened health clinics. UNICEF, the UN’s children’s fund, has dispatched 10,000 hygiene kits, 5,000 family kits, 1,500 sets of winter clothes and blankets, 1,000 tarpaulins, and basic household items to ongoing humanitarian efforts. More than 2,000 people killed as earthquake strikes western Afghanistan “The world must not look away from Afghanistan now.”Īfghan residents sit at a damaged house after earthquake in Sarbuland village of Zendeh Jan, district of Herat province, on October 7,2023 (Photo by Mohsen KARIMI / AFP) (Photo by MOHSEN KARIMI/AFP via Getty Images) Mohsen Karimi/AFP/Getty Images “Organizations like ours are able to provide relief and help recovery but without commitment from international governments and donors, more will fall into humanitarian need, displacement will increase and lives will be lost,” he said. Mark Calder, World Vision Afghanistan’s advocacy lead, told CNN that the latest earthquake was “yet another devastating episode” for Afghans following decades of conflict, successive droughts and a collapsed economy.”įunding from the international community, Calder added, “has been inadequate.” People need urgent medical care, water, food, shelter and help to stay safe,” de Silva added. “We are responding with everything we have. Reinforcement teams from the capital Kabul had arrived to help but there was only one hospital and it was “at full stretch with serious cases being transferred to other private facilities.” “The situation is worse than we imagined with people in devastated villages still desperately trying to rescue survivors from under the rubble with their bare hands,” said Thamindri de Silva, national director at World Vision Afghanistan. People could be seen digging in the rubble to try to find survivors as others gathered in the streets to avoid being hit by debris during aftershocks. Images shared by aid and rescue teams on the ground showed massive heaps of debris and rubble after buildings collapsed. It’s one of the deadliest quakes to hit Afghanistan in recent years – last June, a 5.9 magnitude earthquake in the eastern Paktika and Khost provinces bordering Pakistan, killed more than a thousand people. The 6.3 magnitude quake struck on Saturday 25 miles (40 kilometers) west of Herat city in the western Herat province – the third largest in Afghanistan. International aid groups in Afghanistan are scrambling to send help to survivors of an earthquake which has left more than 2,000 people dead and many more injured in a war-ravaged nation already stricken by an economic crisis. ![]()
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