A devastating disaster marked the beginning of 2023 for Türkiye when, on 6 February, two powerful earthquakes struck the southeastern province of Kahramanmaraş, with magnitudes of Mw 7.7 and 7.6, centered in the towns of Pazarcık and Elbistan, respectively. These quakes, followed by thousands of aftershocks, ravaged an area of 100,000 square kilometers (38,610 square miles), spanning eleven provinces across Türkiye’s Eastern Mediterranean, Eastern Anatolia, and Southeastern Anatolia regions. More than fifteen million people witnessed what may be one of the most catastrophic events of the last millennium, with a total of seven million children—4.5 million in Türkiye and 2.5 million in Syria—directly affected by the disaster.
From the very first day of the disaster, we at the Orphan Foundation worked tirelessly to distribute humanitarian aid through our coordination centers in Adıyaman and Hatay. We delivered sixty truckloads of supplies to remote villages with the support of nearly 600 volunteers and 150 vehicles. We provided psychosocial support and other social services to over ten thousand children, adolescents, and adults for more than two months in the Turkish provinces of Malatya, Hatay, Kilis, Gaziantep, and Adıyaman, as well as in Babisqa, a village in the Syrian province of Idlib. We distributed toys and books to children living in tent cities to help them cope with their experiences. We served hot meals to over 125,000 displaced individuals at our soup kitchens in Adıyaman and Hatay, offering foods specially tailored to the tastes of children. We donated ten containers to the container city built in Elbistan through Türkiye’s Independent Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (known in Turkish by the acronym MÜSİAD) and provided financial assistance to over a thousand families. The total monetary value of our work, made possible by our generous donors, exceeded 40 million TRY.
The most important lesson this disaster taught us was that Türkiye’s construction practices must adhere strictly to regulations, especially given the country’s abnormally high risk of earthquakes. Since even seemingly minor compromises to extant regulations can lead to severe consequences in future disasters, it is crucial to ensure that existing structures are resilient and capable withstand such events.
Our Foundation continued to support earthquake victims throughout Ramadan. Our work also extended beyond Türkiye’s borders during this blessed month, as we provided over 380,000 people across eighteen countries with iftar packages, hygiene kits, toys, books, clothes, and various forms of charity. A couple of months later, during Eid al-Adha, we distributed seven thousand shares of meat to over 400,000 people in Türkiye—particularly those living in the earthquake disaster zone—and twenty other countries.
As part of our educational support efforts, we distributed backpacks, essential school supplies, and books to approximately eighteen thousand children in twelve countries. We furthermore delivered 7,141 electronic devices, including two thousand tablets, to village schools in Hatay and Adıyaman—two provinces severely impacted by the earthquake.
The Orphan Foundation hosted a workshop on disasters and children at Istanbul’s Rami Library on 19 November 2023 to celebrate World Children’s Day. The event brought together seventy-seven academics, NGO leaders, and volunteers to discuss disasters, children’s rights, and collaboration between NGOs and government agencies during disaster response operations. We also distributed a book containing several key recommendations to bolster disaster preparedness, especially among children, that we made available to the public at this workshop.
In line with our slogan “Warm Love Defies the Cold,” we plan to provide winter-specific aid to fifty thousand orphans, disadvantaged children, and their families in twelve countries this year. So far we have provided winter clothes to one thousand children and blankets to six hundred families in Palestine.
Before concluding this chapter, we would like to highlight the atrocities committed by Israel in Palestine and, more specifically, in the Gaza Strip. Subjected to Israeli occupation and brutality for more than seventy-five years, Palestine has, since 7 October, endured some of the most extreme acts of apartheid and genocidal treatment in human history. As the entire world, first and foremost Muslim countries, fails to do anything more meaningful than issue words of condemnation, the Israeli regime feels increasingly more comfortable committing unprecedented acts of barbarity with each passing day. We have witnessed the very documents that enshrine the UN’s founding principles trampled multiple times under the feet of relentless Israeli aggression. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute, the Geneva Conventions, and the Conventions on the Rights of the Child have, quite unfortunately, been revealed to be no more than a collection of worthless pieces of scrap paper that do nothing to protect people from crimes committed against humanity.
And today, as Gaza is being wiped off the face of the map, half of those killed by Israel are children! There is not a single child—or even adult—in Gaza who does not need psychological support. Every right promised to children under the Convention on the Rights of the Child is being crushed under the boots of the occupying forces. Even unborn Palestinian children have not spared from Israel’s ongoing genocide.
Can we not open a humanitarian corridor for the children of Gaza—children who have been suffocating under Israel’s inhumane blockade by air, land, and sea for seventeen years? Indeed, this is the question that the world’s eight billion people must answer. We owe at least this much to these charred and maimed children, many of whom have been left motherless and fatherless.
The Orphan Foundation has been actively involved in many efforts to address the hardships faced by Palestinians both within their homeland and in the diaspora through a range of initiatives. Over the past three years, we have supported 1,974 orphans in the Gaza Strip via various sponsorship programs. This figure rises to 2,300 when the aid we have delivered to Palestinian camps in Lebanon is included. We conduct at least four campaigns in the region each year, focusing on Ramadan, Eid al-Adha, education, and winter assistance. Since 7 October, we have assisted more than 100,000 individuals, with a particular focus on families with orphans and disadvantaged children in our aid efforts. Our initiatives, valued at 500,000 EUR as of 8 December 2023, encompass cash distribution, food packages, powdered milk, hot meals, hygiene kits, diapers, blankets, clean drinking water for settlements, and fuel for hospitals.