Rescue teams on Saturday morning pulled out a family of five and four other persons trapped under rubble, five days since Tukey-Syria earthquake occured on Monday.

The rescue of the nine persons is recorded as the death toll has increased to 24,218, surpassing World Health Organisation predictions just as millions have been left homeless.

According to Associated Press, AP, the family members were pulled from the wreckage of their home in the town of Nurdag, in Gaziantep province, 129 hours after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit the region on Monday.

Adding, Emergency crews are using thermal cameras to locate signs of life as they continue to search for more survivors out of mounds of rubble.

Details of the AP news agency are presented thus:

Rescue teams in Turkey on Saturday pulled to safety a family of five who survived inside their collapsed home for five days following a major earthquake in a sprawling border region of Turkey and Syria.

The death toll, however, was approaching 25,000.

They first extricated mother and daughter Havva and Fatmagul Aslan from among a mound of debris in the hard-hit town of Nurdag, in Gaziantep province, HaberTurk reported.

The teams later reached the father, Hasan Aslan, but he insisted that his other daughter, #Zeynep, and son Saltik Bugra be saved first.

Then, as the father was brought out, rescuers cheered and chanted “God is Great!”

The dramatic rescue after 129 hours brings to nine the number of people rescued Saturday, despite diminishing hopes amid freezing temperatures. They included a disoriented 16-year-old and a 70-year-old woman.

“What day is it?” Kamil Can Agas, the teenager who was pulled out of the rubble in Kahramanmaras, asked his rescuers, according to NTV television.

Rescue workers in the Turkish city of Antakya carried Ergin Guzeloglan, 36, to an ambulance after they pulled him out from a collapsed building on Saturday.

Not everything ended so well, however. Rescuers reached a 13-year-old girl inside the debris of a collapsed building in Hatay province early on Saturday and intubated her.

But she died before the medical teams could amputate a limb and free her from the rubble, Hurriyet newspaper reported.

Even though experts say trapped people can live for a week or more, the odds of finding more survivors were quickly waning.

Rescuers were shifting to thermal cameras to help identify life amid the rubble, a sign of the weakness of any remaining survivors.

President Bashar Assad and his wife have visited injured quake victims in a hospital in the coastal city of Latakia, a base of support for the Syrian leader.

Syrian state TV said Assad and his wife Asma on Saturday morning visited Duha Nurallah, 60, and her son Ibrahim Zakariya, 22, who were pulled out alive the night before from under the rubble of a building in the nearby coastal town of Jableh, five days after the earthquake.