According to the UN humanitarian office, the earthquake has also left an estimated 65 youngsters orphaned or unaccompanied.
Digital Desk: The death toll of children in last week’s devastating earthquake in southeastern Afghanistan has risen to at least 155, reports said.
The United Nation’s humanitarian coordination organization, OCHA, said on Sunday that another 250 children were injured in the magnitude 6 temblor that struck the mountainous villages in the Paktika and Khost provinces near the country’s border with Pakistan, flattening homes and triggering landslides.
Days after the earthquake, Paktika's badly damaged Gayan area, which is now a scene of life in ruins, lost the majority of its children.
The UN has provided a significantly lower estimate of 770 deaths, despite warning that the number may yet climb, while Afghanistan's Taliban leaders have put the final death toll from the earthquake at 1,150, with hundreds more injured.
According to the UN humanitarian office, the earthquake has also left an estimated 65 youngsters orphaned or unaccompanied.
The calamity has turned into a test of the Taliban's capability to defend and the readiness of the international community to help after decades of conflict, famine, poverty, and an economic crash.
Foreign help practically stopped when the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August, just as the US and its NATO allies were preparing to remove their forces. In order to pressure the Taliban administration into allowing a more inclusive system of government and respecting human rights, international nations increased sanctions, blocked bank transfers, and froze further billions of Afghanistan's currency reserves.
The former insurgents have resisted the pressure, placing limitations on women's and girls' freedoms remind of their first period in power in the late 1990s, which provoked criticism from the West.
The Taliban have pleaded for outside assistance, aware of their limitations. Action has been taken by the UN and a number of overstretched relief organizations in the country to keep Afghanistan from starving to death. Convoys of aid have slowly made their way into the outlying areas despite financial and access limitations.
The United Nations Children's Agency announced on Monday that it was attempting to reunite children with their families who had been split up during the pandemonium of the earthquake. In addition, it has established clinics to provide counselling and psychiatric care to Gayan's traumatised children.
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