• Footage of strange blue lights has arisen following Morocco’s tragic earthquake 
• Experts say the glow may be a rare phenomenon called ‘earthquake lights’ 

By Lauren Haughey

Published: 09:44 EDT, 13 September 2023 | Updated: 20:54 EDT, 13 September 2023

Survivors of Morocco’s deadliest earthquake in sixty years have told of the horror of living alongside dead bodies still submerged under collapsed homes, which four days on from the disaster are beginning to rot.

Aziz, a villager from Ijoukak, 10 miles from the quake’s epicentre, said: ‘Until now we have found no survivors, only the dead buried under the rubble… the smell of corpses is very, very strong. We still have no electricity and no water.’ 

The death toll has now surpassed 2,800 and is expected to rise even further, as hopes fade of bringing out those still trapped under piles of debris following Friday’s 6.8-magnitude quake.

Desperate villagers still waiting for aid in the worst-hit regions of the Atlas mountains reported being left to search for survivors themselves, digging with their bare hands to get the bodies of their neighbours and loved ones out of the rubble.

After the fourth night sleeping outside for many Moroccans on Monday – either in makeshift tents or under the stars in rural areas and on the streets of Marrakech – many are waking up today still waiting for help.

Because homes in quake-hit villages of the High Atlas mountains are typically made of mud bricks, stone and clay, it is usually harder for people to survive in them than in modern buildings destroyed by quakes. 

‘When all of that collapses, you don’t have much chance of surviving, because there are no air pockets,’ Rescuers Without Borders’ founder, Arnaud Fraisse, said. 

‘People are generally suffocated by the dust.’

Abdelqader Tarfay, the general secretary of Morocco’s National Health Union, said that the greatest challenge for medics and rescue teams is still to get trapped people out.

‘Then they have to work on removing the remaining corpses under the rubble so that they do not rot,’ he told Al Jazeera.

Homes, mosques and schools have been decimated, with a religious teacher in the village of Tafeghaghte saying that 22 of his students had been killed.

Some residents in the worst-hit mountain regions criticised the government’s relief efforts, saying that while other communities had received assistance they have had to fend for themselves.

Said Hartattouch said it was understandable why some communities were receiving state assistance while others were not, due to the enormity of the destruction that has killed more than 2,800 people.

Remote hamlets in the areas around Ijoukak are still not accessible, the Guardian reports, with ‘huge boulders blocking the roads’. 

‘The problem for Atlas Mountains is that it is big… ‘It’s not possible to help everyone’.

The 34-year-old was at work in Marrakech when the 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck.

The moment the earth began to shake, he rushed to his family’s village more than 60 miles away in the High Atlas Mountains, anxious to get to his mother and two sisters.

When he arrived several hours later, his childhood home lay in ruins.

Speaking outside the rubble of the earth-and-straw house, Hartattouch said that in the days following the quake he had sometimes felt like he was in a horrible dream.

‘But then you wake up the day after and you find reality,’ he said.

While Hartattouch’s mother and sisters survived, fifteen other people from the close community of about 100 people perished.

Among them was his uncle, who was buried by a collapsing wall after he fled his home, and a close family friend who lived next door.

The village of Tinmel lies in a state of devastation. The homes have been crushed and the historic 12th-century mosque that sits at the end of the village and attracted tourists from around the world is now a ruin.

Recounting his return to the village, delayed due to a road blocked by a landslide, Hartattouch described a scramble inside his destroyed family home to gather blankets and his mother’s insulin.

With nowhere to go, the villagers have slept out in the open since the earthquake struck on Friday. 

Residents say the village has received little government help and instead relied on charitable donations. A mother of a 15-day-old baby boy said the child needed milk formula and medicine.

There is an urgent need for tents to protect the people from the dropping temperatures at night.

‘It is the beginning of the cold weather, the first day was very tough,’ Hartattouch said.

Survivors of the most powerful earthquake to hit Morocco in 120 years now face being crushed by boulders dislodged by the tremor, with many forced to sleep outside after entire mountain villages were flattened.

Experts have warned that deadly after-shocks will continue to ravage the country, with seismologists saying more than 25 have already been felt since Friday’s quake – the deadliest in 60 years. 

The death toll has continued to climb as bodies are being pulled from the rubble three days after the 6.8-magnitude quake hit, with officials saying today that at least 2,500 people lost their lives with thousands more injured and missing. 

A mother and her three sons who made it out alive have told of their incredible escape – revealing how they ran from their home in the worst-affected mountainous region mere seconds before it came crashing down.

Khadija Elhil Ali, 32, and her children initially had no idea what was happening when the first tremors began late on Friday night in their tiny hillside village of Asflala, 35 miles south of Marrakech in the Atlas mountains.

‘We soon realised it was an earthquake,’ Khadija told MailOnline, ‘stones were falling in on us from the roof and we knew we must get out. ‘Not long after we did, the whole thing fell down.’ 

Khadija’s husband Hassan, 44, who had been working in Marrakech, arrived home the next morning, overjoyed that his family were safe, but also devastated to see the house which had been in his family for more than a century, reduced to rubble.

Like all the villagers, the couple and their sons, aged 16, 11 and six, are sleeping in tents outside at night, fearful of more after-shocks.

Incredibly, the residents of Asflala escaped without death or serious injury, despite 70 of the 90 homes being destroyed or badly damaged.

‘We are the lucky ones,’ said seasonal worker Hassan, ‘we know that deeper in the mountains entire villages have been wiped out and we pray for them.

‘But I was so shocked when I saw my house in ruins and the street outside blocked by boulders. We will not be able to rebuild this without government help, but so far we’ve heard nothing from them or any charities.

‘They have other priorities for now. ‘

The family’s next-door neighbour Mtouggi Hussein, in his 80s, one of the village’s oldest residents, also lost his house, and now wonders whether he will ever see it rebuilt in his own lifetime.

‘When the earthquake came, I heard voices shouting in the street outside and the lights went out, but people came and helped me out of my house, or I wouldn’t be here today,’ he told MailOnline.

Clambering around the narrow rock-strewn streets and passageways of the village, barely a building appears untouched, with deep cracks forming in the brick and stonework, and huge gaping holes in walls and roofs which were never there before.

Equally worrying, in the hills above the village, huge boulders dislodged by the quake, seem to glower down on the fragile habitations below.

It only underscores the monumental task faced by the Moroccan government in the weeks and months to come, once the immediate work of providing shelter and food is under control.

A little further down the hillside, a family of eight in a more modern house only 20 years old saw the concrete floor drop out of their courtyard, leaving a 15ft deep, 20ft wide chasm to the basement below.

In the rubble were children’s toys and a mud-covered teddy bear.

Father-of-four Hassan Hossa Benali, 42, showed the perilous route to the family kitchen as he stepped gingerly over the void below, balancing on a single plank of wood.

‘We are coming to the house in the daytime to make food, but at nights we sleep in the tents with everyone else,’ he said.

No expert assessment has been made of his creaking house, nor of any of the properties in the village, but they trust that their luck will hold each time they enter to gather belongings from inside the rickety structures.

A few valleys over in Amizmiz, closer to the epicentre of the quake, estimates put the death toll at 2,000 people in that town alone, making the rapidly rising official confirmed total of victims of 2,497 seem extremely conservative.

Moroccans have revealed the traumatising choices they were forced to make as the quake hit late on Friday – with one man saying he watched his parents die as he had a split second to save his 11-year-old son instead.

‘Our house was up there,’ Tayeb ait Ighenbaz told the BBC pointing to a pile of rubble and debris where it once stood. ‘You can see the white blankets and the furniture too. Everything else has gone.’

He said, through tears: ‘I had to choose between my parents and son… I couldn’t help my parents because the wall fell over half of their bodies. It’s so sad. I saw my parents dying.’

Among the luckier ones, Mohamed, a resident of the small town of Moulay Brahim, risked his life to save his wife and two small children, kicking in the door to the room they were trapped in as rubble fell around him.

While the family’s home was heavily damaged and the family have been forced to live in a tent, they told Al Jazeera they are simply grateful to be alive.

Foreign teams have today joined the intensifying race against the clock to rescue any remaining survivors from beneath the rubble of flattened mountain villages. 

British rescuers are among the international operatives assisting, after Rabat announced yesterday it had accepted offers from the UK, Spain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates ‘to send search and rescue teams’.

It noted the foreign teams were in contact with Moroccan authorities to coordinate efforts, and said only four offers had been accepted so far, arguing that ‘a lack of coordination could be counterproductive’.

President Emmanuel Macron said France was willing to provide aid ‘the second’ Morocco requested it.

Around 300,000 people were affected by the quake, the UN has estimated, with many forced to sleep in rural encampments and on the streets of Marrakech for the past three nights.

Terrifying footage shows the moment people ran for their lives as Marrakech was rocked by the powerful magnitude quake, the epicentre of which was around 40 miles away, destroying homes and damaging historic buildings.

But the worst affected areas were the douars, indigenous Amazigh villages in the High Atlas Mountains, which pictures show have been completely razed to the ground in many cases.

With countless people still missing, rescuers are now in a growing race against time to dig any survivors from the rubble of devastated mountain villages, with many admitting that this is now a mission to recover bodies.

A French aid group that specializes in locating people trapped under debris said it is withdrawing an offer to send a nine-person search-and-rescue team after waiting without success for a green light from Morocco to deploy. Rescuers Without Borders’ founder, Arnaud Fraisse, said ‘our role is not to find bodies.’ 

Because homes in quake-hit villages of the High Atlas mountains are typically made of mud bricks with roofs of wood, stone and clay, he said, the hope of finding survivors at this point is slim.

‘When all of that collapses, you don’t have much chance of surviving, because there are no air pockets,’ Fraisse said – a contrast to places where buildings are made of concrete or other strong materials. ‘People are generally suffocated by the dust.’

‘It’s difficult to pull people out alive because most of the walls and ceilings turned to earthen rubble when they fell, burying whoever was inside without leaving air spaces,’ a military rescue worker, who asked not to be named, said at an army centre south of Marrakech near the epicentre.

With many homes fashioned out of mud bricks and timber or cement and breeze blocks, structures crumbled easily in mounds of debris when the quake struck late on Friday evening, without creating the pockets of air that earthquake-ready concrete buildings can provide.

In a region not used to such powerful quakes, even concrete homes or buildings often lack anti-seismic design, experts said, leaving survivors and rescuers to sift through mounds of rubble with hardly any walls left, where homes once stood.

‘This kind of collapse causes greater air tightness due to the types of material, like mud brick,’ Antonio Nogales, coordinator of operations for Firemen United without Borders, a Spanish rescue team on the ground, told Spain’s TVE broadcaster.

‘Steel and concrete facilitate the possibility of survivors, but these (mud and brick) materials (common in Morocco) mean that in the first moments the chances of getting people out alive are reduced,’ Nogales said.

Those who have survived Morocco’s deadliest earthquake in more than six decades have been struggling to find food, water and shelter, amid warnings of the humanitarian disaster worsening.

On Sunday, many across the country were forced to spend a third night in the open after the 6.8 magnitude quake hit late on Friday. 

‘I’m still traumatised by what I experienced yesterday. I’d rather stay here with my wife and six-year-old son than risk death because of a collapsing roof,’ a Marrakech resident called Bilal told Middle East Eye.

In Marrakech, several hundred people who are unable to return home have since set up camp in Place des Ferblantiers, near the south-west of the city and the medina. 

Some stretched out on the central reservation of the city’s main road, Mohamed VI Avenue, while others lay at the foot of their parked cars. 

The earthquake cracked and crumbled parts of the walls that surround Marrakech’s old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site built in the 12th century. 

The city is Morocco’s most widely visited destination, known for its palaces, spice markets, tanneries and Jemaa El Fna, a vibrant square full of food vendors and musicians. 

But once aid crews and soldiers leave, the challenges facing hundreds of thousands who call the area home will likely remain.

The Red Cross warned it could take years to repair the damage caused by the quake.

‘It won’t be a matter of a week or two… We are counting on a response that will take months, if not years,’ said Hossam Elsharkawi, its Middle East and North Africa director.

Members of the Moroccan Parliament are scheduled to convene Monday to create a government fund for earthquake response at the request of King Mohammed VI.

The kingdom has declared three days of national mourning in the wake of the disaster. 

Tourists and locals have described rushing to get out of the buildings they were in and being worried about returning to houses and hotels in the aftermath.

Holidaymaker Mark Chester and his wife Julie from Southampton were in the Medina Gardens hotel in Marrakech when it occurred shortly after 11pm on Friday.

‘We had just gone to bed and we soon realised what was going on,’ recalled civil servant Mr Chester, 56.

‘We ran out of the building and eventually the hotel put beds and sunbeds out on the grass so that people could sleep outside. There was a good spirit of co-operation between the people there, about three-quarters of them British.

‘At about 6.30pm we were allowed back inside, but everyone was still nervous about aftershocks.’ 

Tourists and citizens have reported to hospitals in Marrakech and elsewhere to donate blood for the injured. Among the donors were members of Morocco’s national football team.

Other volunteers organised food and essential goods to help quake victims, after complaints that authorities were slow to respond.

‘Everyone must mobilise,’ said one volunteer, Mohamed Belkaid, 65. ‘And that includes the authorities, but they seem to be absent.’

The education ministry announced that school classes were ‘suspended’ in the worst-hit villages of Al-Haouz province, the quake epicentre.

Some parts of Marrakech’s historic medina and its network of alleyways saw significant damage, with mounds of rubble and crumpled buildings in the World Heritage site.

Videos also show dust emanating from parts of the Koutoubia Mosque, one of the city’s best known historic sites. 

The United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva began its session on Monday with a minute’s silence for the quake victims.

‘We are part of a global collectivity: humanity,’ said Gambia’s ambassador Muhammadu Kah, who proposed the tribute.

The quake was the deadliest in Morocco since a 1960 earthquake destroyed Agadir, killing at least 12,000 people.

This map reveals the epicentre of the deadly Morocco earthquake, which killed over 2,500 people and injured thousands more when it struck last Friday.

Geologists said the 6.8 magnitude tremor was the biggest quake to hit the heart of the country in more than 120 years and the deadliest in six decades.

Rescuers are still searching for survivors, with some in remote areas forced to dig with their bare hands because heavy lifting machinery can’t get to them.

The epicentre of the earthquake, which struck at 23:11 local time (23:11 BST) on Friday, was in the High Atlas Mountains, 44 miles (71km) south-west of Marrakesh, at a depth of 11.5 miles (18.5km), the US Geological Survey said.

The main tectonic driver is the collision between the Eurasian and African plates, the boundary for which sits around 350 miles (563km) north from the epicentre.

This is what originally led to the formation of the Atlas Mountains, which run through Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

Currently, collisions between the Eurasian and African plates are what is causing the increased seismicity in the area, with GPS measurements showing that the Atlas Mountains are moving about 1 millimetre closer to each other every year.  

This compression is what is causing a friction between plates, and in turn likely led to the latest quake, according to José A. Peláez, a professor in geophysics at the Universidad de Jaén.

The High Atlas Mountains also have a unique geological feature where the Earth’s outermost layer – known as the lithosphere – is thinner than usual, while there is an unusual rise of the mantle. 

What is particularly unusual about this deadly earthquake, however, is that scientists say such powerful tremors don’t tend to occur in Morocco.

In fact, there hasn’t been any quakes bigger than a magnitude 6.0 within 300 miles (500km) of Friday’s epicentre since before 1900.

Most of the seismic activity relating to the Eurasian and African plates occurs further east in Mediterranean, with Italy, Greece and Turkey particularly affected.

There are usually two main hotspots for earthquakes in Morocco.

The first is offshore, along the Azores-Gibraltar transform fault and the Alboran Sea, while the second is between the Rif mountains in the northern part of the country and Algeria’s Tell Atlas mountain range.

Major earthquakes to hit Morocco in recent years include a 6.4 magnitude tremor in 2016, which struck offshore northeast of the city of Al Hoceïma and killed one person.

There was also a 6.3 magnitude quake that killed 631 people in 2004 and another one of the same intensity in 1960, leading to the deaths of between 12,000 and 15,000 people when it hit near the city of Agadir.

Five years prior to that there was a quake close to the location of the latest tremor, which had a magnitude of about 5.8.

Going further back in history, an earthquake with an estimate magnitude of between 6.5 and 7.0 devastated the cities of Fes and Meknes in 1755, killing at least 15,000 people. 

The official death toll for Friday’s disaster so far stands at 2,681 confirmed dead and at least 2,501 people injured, including more than 1,400 who are seriously hurt.