ISLAMABAD, October 13, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – UN officials drew Thursday, October 13, a bleak picture of the situation in quake-ravaged Pakistan, warning that the international community is loosing the battle to help the victims and survivors.

"The devastation is much bigger than the tsunami and much bigger definitely than what happened in the United States with Katrina hurricane," Hussein Gezairy, the head of the World Health Organization's regional office that covers Pakistan, told reporters in Islamabad, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

He said the earthquake was more devastating than last year's Indian Ocean tsunami in terms of the number of homeless and destruction to infrastructure.

"In the tsunami 1.5 million people were made homeless, but in this case we expect more than 2.5 million to be homeless," asserted the UN official.

"For the 1.5 people who were homeless something like 10 billion dollars were mobilized. I do not expect this to be happening in Pakistan, but I hope that people will give much more," Gezairy said.

The 7.6-magnitude quake has killed more than 25,000 people in Pakistan and 1,300 in India, leaving some 2.5 million people homeless and destroying entire towns across an area of 20,000 square kilometers.

Experts say there are already signs of "donor fatigue" following last year's Asian tsunami and more recent disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and tropical storm Stan in Guatemala.

Quake victims look on as others receive relief supplies in Muzaffarabad. (Reuters)

Gezairy said it would be far more difficult to reach earthquake victims still cut off in the mountains.

"The tsunami was all along the coasts, no roads or bridges were destroyed and the damage was a few hundred meters inside," he said.

"During the tsunami it was possible to have some ships and in this case only helicopters can reach the disaster areas, but they cannot transport a large number people and equipment.

"It is much, much more difficult than the tsunami," averred the UN official.

The quake has wrecked havoc on Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, with most houses, government buildings and shops totally collapsed.

Once a pretty riverside city of around 100,000, the quake left the province capital, Muzaffarabad, barely recognizable, turning it to a virtual city of death.

Drawing a similar gloomy picture, UN relief chief Jan Egeland told the BBC "we are losing a race against the clock in the small villages".

"I've never seen such devastation before. We are in the sixth day of operation, and every day the scale of devastation is getting wider," he added.

"We have seen a much graver picture and I believe we need to triple the number of helicopters in the operation. My appeal to the world is to come up with more aid, more relief, and more resources," said the UN official.

Some 20 helicopters have been lent to the aid effort by the international community, but the vast area of destruction is still stretching resources to the limit.

Egeland told AFP told AFP after a helicopter tour of the disaster zone in Pakistan-administered Kashmir that quake-hit Pakistan is in a "desperate situation" with survivors cut off beyond major towns five days after the disaster.

"This is a desperate situation. As you can see we are making progress in the more populated areas but it is so hard to reach the others."

Asked if the earthquake was a unique disaster, Egeland said: "It has never been worse."

The UN official stressed that the trail of devastation caused by the quake was "beyond belief."

Local and international agencies are struggling to cope with the scale of the devastation caused by the quake, biggest disaster in Pakistan's history, in a mountainous and already impoverished region on the edge of the Himalayas.

Quake victims carry their belongings in Muzaffarabad. (Reuters)

Pakistan's disaster response chief said Thursday the authorities would not be able to provide shelter before the winter to many of the millions of people made homeless by the earthquake.

"It is not possible to provide shelter to all the affected people before the winter approaches," General Farooq Javed told a news conference in Islamabad.

He said there were dire shortages of blankets and tents.

"We are importing two million blankets from outside. We are importing 100,000 tents of large size from abroad."

It would take "many years to say the least", he said, to rebuild the quake-hit areas.

Javed said the government, with the help of local and international relief organizations, would set up tent-villages to try to accommodate the affected people in the rugged Himalayan region before winter.

According to one report, some 200,000 houses had been destroyed, he said.

Injured Kashmiris at a makeshift hospital in Bagh, southeast of Muzaffarbad. (Reuters)

Heart-breaking decisions were being made across Pakistan late Thursday as night set in and rescuers gave up on the search for survivors five days after a massive earthquake.

Rescue teams were packing their bags in Muzaffarabad as attention turned to bringing relief to desperate survivors.

"We worked hard but the site had become too dangerous so we had to leave it," said Daniel Davis, a member of a British team that struggled for half a day to save a 20-year-old woman they believed to be alive beneath a collapsed house here.

"It was terrible, as if we had abandoned her."

But many frantic survivors refused to lose hope, especially the parents of hundreds of children who were buried alive beneath their schools.

Some continued to dig with their bare hands throughout the day Thursday.

"I have found one of the bodies of one of their friends but there is only a 10 percent chance that my sons are alive," said Man Sabar Naqui, 50, who was looking for his two sons aged six and seven.

In the northern town of Bakot, North West Frontier Province Education Minister Fazle Ali said around 8,000 schools were damaged or totally destroyed in Pakistan's northwestern province by the massive earthquake.

"Hundreds of children still remain buried under the debris and hundreds of teachers are also feared to have died," Ali said.