A heartbreaking image from an earthquake-stricken city in Turkey shows a grieving father holding the hand of his dead daughter lying under the rubble of a razed apartment block.

The photo obtained from the city of Kahramanmaras, near the epicentre of the quake, shows dad Mesut Hancer, dressed in a high-vis coat, sitting on a pile of debris and holding the hand of his deceased 15-year-old daughter, Irmak, which sticks out from under a piece of concrete that fell onto her bed, crushing her to death.

The teenager was seen lying dead on a bed which is largely buried on in the rubble and not able to be extracted.

The heartbreaking picture emerged after two major earthquakes struck southern Turkey and northwestern Syria on Monday, followed by a third quake with a magnitude of 5.7 on Tuesday morning.

Elsewhere in Syria, residents digging through a collapsed building in a north-west Syrian town discovered a crying infant–with bruises on her back–whose mother appears to have given birth to her while buried underneath the rubble from.

UNICEF fears that thousands of children may have been killed in Turkey and Syria.

The number of confirmed deaths in Syria rose to 1,602, bringing the death toll in both countries to 5,021.

Turkey’s disaster management agency said it had 11,342 reports of collapsed buildings, of which 5,775 had been confirmed.