Twin earthquakes that devastated rural villages in northwest Iran killed a total of 306 people, most of them women and children, Iranian Minister of Health Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi said yesterday, adding that the search for bodies was ongoing.
Another 3,037 were injured, of whom 2,011 were given first aid at the scene and the rest were taken to hospital, where 700 surgeries were performed, Vahid Dastjerdi told lawmakers in a report published on the Iranian parliament’s Web site.
“We are continuing the search for bodies,” she said.
Another official addressing the lawmakers, Hassan Ghadami, a deputy interior minister in charge of crisis management, said: “Many of the victims were killed in the first hours [after the quake] due to the mass of muddy rubble ... and the old structure of houses in the region.”
The two earthquakes, measuring magnitude 6.4 and 6.3, rumbled through northwest Iran on Saturday on quick succession, leveling mud brick and concrete homes in villages to the northeast of the city of Tabriz.
The head of Iran’s Red Crescent, Abdolhossein Faghih, told the same hearing that 230 villages had been badly damaged, including a number totally destroyed.
Others suffered moderate damage, Ghadami said.
Iran’s government has launched a fund to quickly rebuild homes in the mountainous region before the onset of the harsh winter in about four months.
A state grant of nearly US$1,000 per family has been approved, along with low-interest loans for up to US$6,000.
Faghih said the Red Crescent has provided relief in the meantime for the more than 16,000 people left homeless, distributing thousands of tents and blankets, and food and water.
Iran rejected offers of outside help in the wake of the quakes from a number of countries, including Taiwan, the US, Germany, Turkey, Singapore and Russia. It said it could cope with the disaster itself.
“We received offers of help from several countries ... but as we have sufficient men and resources, we did not need this foreign aid. We thanked them for their offers,” Faghih said.
Authorities called off rescue operations on Sunday after saying all possible survivors had been recovered.
Iran sits astride several major fault lines and is prone to frequent earthquakes, some of which have been devastating.
The deadliest in recent years was a magnitude 6.6 quake that struck the southeastern city of Bam in December 2003, killing 31,000 people — about a quarter of the population — and destroying the city’s ancient mud-built citadel.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS