Rescue efforts for survivors are drawing to a close today in earthquake-hit Turkey, nearly two weeks after the deadliest disaster in the country’s modern history, with many now praying only for the bodies of their loved ones to be found so they can they bury them.

“If I were to pray to find a dead man? Yes (…) we have to hand over his body to the family,” said the excavator operator Akin Bozkurt as he removed the debris from a damaged building in the city of Kahramanmaras.

“When you pull a body out from under tons of rubble, families wait with hope,” Bozkurt continued. “They want to have a funeral. They want a grave.”

According to Islamic tradition, the dead must be buried as soon as possible.

The head of the Turkish disaster agency AFAD Yunus Sezer said search and rescue efforts would largely end tonight.

More than 46,000 people have been killed by the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria on February 6. The toll is expected to rise significantly as around 345,000 apartments are now known to have been destroyed in the country and many people are still missing.

Neither Turkey nor Syria has announced how many people are still missing after the earthquake.

In one of the last efforts to pull survivors from the ruins, 12 days after the deadly earthquake, rescue crews started removing rubble by hand at a site where rescue operations were underway in Antakia (Antioch) yesterday, Saturday night.

Trained dogs and thermal cameras had detected signs of life from two people, according to rescuers, but shortly after midnight, eight hours after efforts to extricate them began, teams called off rescue efforts.

“No one is alive,” said Mujdat Erdogan, a member of AFAD, with his uniform and face full of dust. “I don’t believe we can save people anymore.”

A team from Kyrgyzstan tried to rescue a Syrian family of five from the ruins of a building in Antakya in southern Turkey.

Three people, including a child, were pulled alive from the rubble. The mother and father survived, but the child later died of dehydration, according to the rescue team. His older sister and twin brother also didn’t make it.

WHO: Millions of people need help

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that around 26 million people in Turkey and Syria are in need of humanitarian assistance.

The US secretary of state is expected to arrive in Turkey today to discuss ways in which Washington can further assist Ankara in its efforts to deal with the aftermath of the worst natural disaster in its modern history.

In Syria, which has reported the death of more than 5,800 people, the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) has announced that authorities in the north-west of the country are blocking access to the area.

“This complicates our operations. It must be resolved immediately,” WFP director David Beazley said on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

Most of the casualties in Syria are in the northwest, an area controlled by rebels who are at war with forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“Time is running out and our money is running out. It’s costing our business around 50 million a month just for our earthquake response, so if Europe doesn’t want a new wave of refugees, we need to get the support we need,” Beazley noted.

Thousands of Syrians who fled to Turkey to escape their country’s civil war have returned home to the war zone – at least for now