Hundreds of thousands of people in Turkey have taken refuge in government shelters and private businesses.

Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said Tuesday that an estimated 338,000 people have gone to government shelters or hotels in the earthquake aftermath. People have also gathered at shopping malls, mosques, stadiums and community centers for shelter and basic needs.

Roads used to bring aid across the Turkish border into northern Syria have been damaged badly enough to pause United Nations aid to the region, according to Sanjana Quazi, deputy head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' regional office for the Syrian crisis.

"Hatay province, where the border and the U.N. hub are, is very badly affected," she said. "We are looking at alternative routes."

From a castle in Gaziantep to a citadel in Aleppo, as rescuers search desperately for survivors after the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, concerns were also growing Tuesday for some of the region’s most cherished historic sites.

UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency, said in a statement that it was carrying out a survey of the affected areas and discovered many of the sites had either been damaged or collapsed completely.

The ancient Syrian city of Aleppo, where towers and walls have survived ancient and modern wars, has been badly affected. The city’s famous Citadel, a World Heritage Site, was damaged; it had only recently been repaired following the fierce street fighting of the battle for Aleppo in 2012, part of the long-running and still ongoing civil war in the country.

In Turkey, UNESCO said several buildings in the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakır in the country’s southeast had collapsed, raising fears for the Diyarbakır Fortress and the Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape, another World Heritage Site.

Read the full story here.

War-ravaged Ukraine will send an 87-strong search and rescue team to Turkey to “help eliminate the consequences” of the earthquake.

The announcement came in a decree published on the Ukrainian Cabinet office’s website Tuesday.

“Ukrainian specialists have relevant experience in overcoming the consequences of natural disasters and will arrive in the affected regions as soon as possible. They will help with the whole range of work on the recovery from the earthquake,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement.

In a tweet, he said Ukraine was also sending equipment to affected regions in Turkey.

The total number of those killed in the natural disaster has climbed to 5,261, according to updated information provided by both Turkish and Syrian authorities.

The total number of those dead in Syria comes to 1,712, according to the Syrian Health Ministry and the White Helmets. More than 3,700 have been injured in the country.

In Turkey, 3,549 people were killed and 22,168 injured as search and rescue teams continue their work, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday. More than 8,000 people have been rescued so far.

As many as 23 million people, including around 1.4 million children, are likely to have been impacted by the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, according to the World Health Organization.

For those who want to help the survivors of the disaster, which has left more than 5,000 people dead, there are several international humanitarian organizations seeking donations to fund their aid efforts.

Read more about how you can help here.

The Palestinian Authority says 57 Palestinian refugees have died in the powerful quake in Turkey and Syria.

Officials said 14 were killed in Turkey and 43 in Syria, which for decades has hosted nearly half a million Palestinians in large refugee camps and remains one of the few Arab states to offer them almost full civil rights.

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said several Palestinians are reported missing under collapsed buildings in the hard-hit al-Raml camp in western Syria.

While aid efforts focused on rescuing those trapped under collapsed buildings, those who survived found themselves sheltering in cars, struggling to keep themselves fed, hydrated and warm in the freezing conditions.

“We have been on the streets since two days,” a distraught 31-year-old factory worker, Mesut Demir, told NBC News. 

Demir said he has been staying inside his car with his wife and sons, ages 4 and 6, in the city of Gaziantep, not far from the epicenter of the first earthquake. He said other families in the area were doing the same.

When night falls, the parents let the two children sleep in the car while they take shelter outside and light a bonfire.

“We need tent, blankets, food, water but no one came to help us because the priority was the ones under the rubble," he said.