NURGAL, Afghanistan — Volunteers and rescuers were pulling more bodies from the rubble of destroyed buildings in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, four days after an earthquake that has so far left nearly 1,470 people dead, Taliban authorities said.

The 6.0-magnitude earthquake that jolted the mountainous region bordering Pakistan on Sunday night is one of the deadliest in the South Asian country in decades.

The toll — 1,469 dead and more than 3,700 injured — is likely to rise, deputy Taliban government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat said on Thursday.

“Additional bodies were recovered during these efforts, leading to an increase in the reported casualties,” Fitrat wrote on X.

“We cannot stop hoping” that injured people remain alive under the rubble, he told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Limited access to the hardest-hit areas of mountainous Kunar province delayed rescue and relief efforts, with rockfalls from repeated aftershocks obstructing already precarious roads etched onto the side of cliffs.

Searchers retrieve bodies as Afghan quake toll seen to rise

While most of the areas that had been unreachable were accessed by Wednesday, expectations of finding survivors were fading fast.

“Many survivors are still believed to be trapped beneath collapsed homes in remote villages, and the window for finding them alive is rapidly closing,” the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement on Wednesday night.

Crisis within a crisis

Poor infrastructure in the impo­verished country, still fragile from four decades of war, has also stymied the emergency response.

The WHO warned that local health care services were “under immense strain,” with shortages of trauma supplies, medicines and staff., This news data comes from:http://evhl-ao-ssn-oqpq.gyglfs.com

The agency has appealed for million to deliver lifesaving health interventions and expand mobile health services and supply distribution.

“Every hour counts,” Jamshed Tanoli, WHO emergency team lead in Afghanistan, said in a statement. “Hospitals are struggling, families are grieving and survivors have lost everything.”

The loss of United States foreign aid to the country in January has exacerbated the rapid depletion of emergency stockpiles and logistical resources.

Nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations have warned that the earthquake creates a crisis within a crisis, with cash-strapped Afghanistan already contending with overlapping humanitarian disasters.

UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi said on X the quake had “affected more than 500,000 people” in eastern Afghanistan.

After decades of conflict, the country is contending with endemic poverty, severe drought and the influx of millions of Afghans forced back to the country by neighbors Pakistan and Iran since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021.

Even as Afghanistan reeled from its latest disaster, Pakistan began a new push to expel Afghans, with more than 6,300 people crossing the Torkham border point in quake-hit Nangarhar province on Tuesday.