A charity reports that a Syrian mother and her infant are recovering after being twice pulled from the wreckage of her earthquake-damaged home in a week.
When a portion of Dima's home in Jindayris collapsed due to last Monday's earthquake, she was seven months pregnant.
She was hospitalized in Afrin at a hospital supported by the Syrian American Medical Society (Sams), where she later gave birth to a boy named Adnan and sustained minor injuries.
When they went home again, the house completely collapsed three days later.
Rescuers treated Dima for a critical lower limb injury while bringing Adnan back to Afrin's al-Shifa Hospital in a critical state with severe dehydration and jaundice.
The infant is responding well to treatment, according to pediatrician Dr. Abdulkarim Hussein al-Ibrahim, who on Monday sent a WhatsApp message to the BBC.
"Adnan's health. has greatly enhanced," he claimed. "We are only feeding him, and we are giving him intravenous drips for the rest of his needs. ".
Adnan was captured on camera relaxing in an incubator while wearing a drip on his wrist in Sams' video footage.
Dima, her husband Abdul Majid, and their other nine children are now living in a tent after being released from the hospital once more. She has been making daily trips to Afrin to visit Adnan in the hospital.
After she gave birth, her family was compelled to move back into her partially destroyed house because there was no other place for them to stay in Jindayris, one of the worst-hit towns in opposition-held northwest Syria.
Like thousands of other people who were impacted, they have also not received any other assistance since the earthquake.
In the region, which is the final stronghold of jihadists and rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad's forces for 12 years, 4.1 million people, the majority of them women and children, were already dependent on humanitarian aid before the disaster.
The only border crossing that the UN is permitted to use to deliver humanitarian aid is Bab al-Hawa in the province of Idlib, and as of Sunday, only 52 lorries carrying aid from UN agencies had arrived from Turkey via that point.
The White Helmets' first responders operate in opposition-held areas, so the deliveries, which were planned before the earthquake but were delayed by damaged roads and other logistical issues, did not include the heavy machinery and other specialized equipment needed by them.
According to Dr. Ibrahim, there is a severe shortage of the drugs, equipment, beds, and blankets required to treat the numerous injured people still being pulled from the debris.
No hospital has the ability to handle this many injuries, he cautioned. "Everywhere is packed. " .
The lack of shelter and access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services is also a major concern for the medical relief organization, whose facilities in the area have assisted more than 2,000 earthquake victims, according to Dr. Basel Termanini, chairman of the Sams Foundation.
He told the BBC, "We can treat the women after trauma or after delivery, but they need to go back to a safe environment with the barest amount of housing, food, and clean water.
"Unfortunately, due to scarce resources and the noticeably delayed aid arriving from the only lifeline of Bab al-Hawa crossing, this is generally lacking in northwestern Syria. ".
The UN and the international community, according to Dr. Termanini, are "quite guilty of poor planning and failed execution.".
In order to "fill in the gaps" in shelter and nutrition, Sams was currently collaborating with the White Helmets and the Syrian Forum, a group of nonprofit organizations assisting people in the area.
But in order to prevent a serious humanitarian crisis, the international community must band together because there are enormous needs. ".
Since the 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck southern Turkey, it is known that more than 35,000 people have died in Syria and Turkey.
More than 800 more people have died in northwestern Syria, according to the UN, than the total number of deaths reported over the weekend by the White Helmets and the Syrian government combined.
Martin Griffiths, the UN's top humanitarian official, told reporters that the initial "rescue phase" of the crisis was "drawing to a close" while visiting the government-controlled city of Aleppo on Monday.
"The humanitarian phase," he said, "is the urgency of giving these people shelter, psychosocial care, food, education, and a sense of the future. That's our obligation now.".
In addition, Mr. Griffiths stated that the UN hoped to send aid to areas controlled by the opposition across the front lines from government territory, something that has infrequently occurred throughout the nation's 12-year civil war.
The leading jihadist coalition Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), according to the UN, has impeded "cross-line" deliveries since the earthquake. HTS, however, has denied the charge and charged that the UN is "politicizing the emergency response."
