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Omar Rahal heard a voice coming from the rubble, so faint that he struggled to understand if it might only be in his head. The previous night, two earthquakes of magnitude 7.8 and 7.6 had levelled his village, Harem, in the rebel-held province of Idlib in Syria, flattening dozens of buildings including the block of flats where his cousin Mahmoud lived with his wife and their seven children.

A few hours later, Rahal, the local police chief, rushed into the rubble of the house in the hope of finding Mahmoud and his family alive. All morning he heard no signs of life, but at 12.30pm his ears picked up five words spoken by what sounded like a little girl: “Get me out of here.”

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“We were asleep when the earthquake struck – I thought it was an airstrike so I ran outside,” said Mohammed Hadi, weeping gently as he clutched his baby daughter. “I grabbed my wife and two of my children and took them with me. My wife was gripping my hand tightly as we ran. But then, once we got outside, she realised two of our daughters were still inside and ran back in to save them.”

He described seeing a flash of white, which cleared to reveal the rubble of what was once his new home. The collapse of the five-storey apartment block had claimed his three loved ones’ lives as Hadi watched.