Baby pulled from Hatay rubble after 128 hours becomes a brief stay against despair

HATAY, Turkey — After the 7.8-magnitude earthquake of 6 February 2023, rescue crews in southern Turkey worked past the point where survival tables said they should stop. Infants have little fat, little water and almost no ability to hold heat. Past three or four days under concrete, the official hope for a baby is close to none.

On 11 February, about 128 hours after the first shock, teams in Hatay province — reports placed the site in İskenderun, in the same devastated coastal belt as Antakya — lifted out a girl roughly two months old. She had spent five days in cold and dust without food or water. Video showed her dirty, then washed and fed. Crowds cheered. Nurses who did not know her name called her Gizem — “mystery.”

The quake and its aftershocks killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey and Syria. Antakya, the old center of Hatay, was among the worst-hit cities. Each late live extraction briefly interrupted the sense that the search had become recovery only.

The infant was taken to hospital in Adana, then into state care in Ankara. Her mother was at first believed dead. A relative came forward. A DNA test matched the child to Yasemin Begdaş, who was still being treated in Adana. Fifty-four days after the rescue, Turkey’s family minister flew the baby south. Her given name is Vetin Begdaş. Her father and two brothers had died in the collapse. Mother and daughter were the only survivors of the immediate family.

Doctors do not treat 128 hours under rubble as a model. Hypothermia, crush injury, dehydration and dust inhalation kill most people far sooner, and infants faster still. This child lived in an air pocket long enough for crews to reach her. That is not a rewrite of disaster medicine. It is one recorded exception, later completed by a DNA match and a hospital reunion — and framed, for a few days in February, as proof that the wreckage had not finished speaking.

Sources

• Snopes fact-check of the 128-hour rescue photograph (Bild / Hamdi Gökbulut), February 2023
• Al Jazeera and The Independent, reunion of Vetin/Gizem Begdaş with Yasemin Begdaş, April 2023
• CBS News, ministry confirmation of the 54-day reunion