Authorities in Turkey and Syria confirmed that the death toll from this week's earthquakes has topped 21,000 while several survivors were recovered from the wreckage of buildings.
Rescuers kept searching through the night, even though they had less and less prospect of finding survivors among the rubble.
In the Turkish city of Gaziantep, an adolescent named Adnan Muhammed Korkut was rescued from the wreckage of a collapsed building largely unharmed.
The 17-year-old grinned at his cheering friends and family as he was brought outside and placed onto a stretcher.
"Thank God you arrived,'' he said, embracing his mother and others who leaned down to kiss and hug him as he was being loaded into an ambulance. "Thank you, everyone.''
He had been forced to drink his own urine, "I was able to survive that way,'' he said.
In the Samandag district of Hatay province, a 10-year-old boy was saved with his mother, and in the same area, a seven-year-old girl named Asya Donmez was rescued after 95 hours and taken to hospital.
Turkish state broadcaster TRT reported that about 8,000 people had been rescued from the rubble in Turkey so far.
In Syria, some 3,000 volunteers are searching for survivors.
"Tears of joy and cheers for life." "We rise again motivated with each case of rescue," the rescue organization tweeted late Thursday.
Since Monday's 7.8-magnitude earthquake, more than 1,509 aftershocks have been reported, according to Turkey's Disaster and Management Authority (AFAD).
Nations from all around the world dispatched search and rescue teams, medical personnel, field hospitals, and supplies to earthquake-affected areas.
According to the foreign ministry, 95 nations have offered assistance, and approximately 7,000 rescue workers have been dispatched to help.
But after what Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the "disaster of the century," the prospects of locating survivors in the subzero weather are dwindling.
