Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the death toll from the Kahramanmaraş earthquake has risen to 46,104 in Turkey alone, and said that his government is seeking to house half a million survivors in prefabricated homes.
Adding the latest announced death toll from the earthquake in Syria, which is 5,914 dead, brings the total death toll in the two countries to 52,18.
Erdogan said - in a press conference held yesterday, Monday, after a government meeting - that the double earthquake in Kahramanmaraş "caused the largest loss of life, destruction and pain in the history of the Turkish Republic."
The Turkish president stated that the number of destroyed buildings that urgently require demolition and badly damaged buildings in 11 states in the earthquake region reached 230,000.
He explained that 3 million and 320 thousand people were evacuated from the earthquake zone and went to other states, while 800 thousand people in the region took refuge in their villages.
He added that more than 1.5 million people live in tents, 53 thousand people live in prefabricated housing, 123 thousand people live in public facilities and educational institutions, 160 thousand people live in student residences, and about 137 thousand people live in hotels in the earthquake zone.
"Our goal is to transfer half a million earthquake survivors to 100,000 prefabricated houses within two months," Erdogan said.
He also talked about the upcoming reconstruction plan, saying, "We plan to build 488,000 new housing units in the earthquake zones, of which 405,000 are apartments and the rest are rural homes."
On the sixth of last February, two earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 and 7.6 struck southern Turkey and northern Syria, followed by thousands of aftershocks, some of which were of moderate intensity.
The disaster, which centered on the state of Kahramanmaraş, claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people and millions of those affected, and left huge material damage in 11 Turkish states.
A large number of Syrian refugees live in the southern states of Turkey, which witnessed great damage as a result of the earthquake, due to their proximity to their country, which explains the high number of victims among them in Turkey, in addition to the victims in Syria.