A three-year-old boy was rescued alive from the wreckage of a collapsed building in the Venezuelan coastal state of La Guaira early on Tuesday, six days after twin earthquakes devastated the region, according to local authorities and the Jordanian civil defence team that carried out the extraction. The child, identified by Venezuela’s acting president as Klieber Morán, was pulled from the Los Corales Garden 1 residential block and transferred to a hospital in Caracas, where medical sources described his vital signs as stable.

The Jordanian rescuers worked for hours to reach the boy, who had been trapped since the magnitude-7.2 and -7.5 earthquakes struck less than a minute apart on 24 June. Video footage released by the Jordanian civil defence showed the team cheering as they carried the child, wrapped in a blanket, to a waiting ambulance. Venezuelan officials gave conflicting ages for the survivor: acting President Delcy Rodríguez said he was three, while National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez described him as two. The survival of a person buried for nearly 140 hours is a rare event; specialists typically cite a 72-hour window as the period during which trapped victims have the highest chance of being found alive. The government’s daily bulletin recorded no other rescues on Tuesday, after four people were pulled alive from the debris the previous day.

The earthquakes, the deadliest in Latin America in recent years, caused widespread destruction across La Guaira and parts of the capital, Caracas. A preliminary satellite-based assessment by NASA, cited by several international agencies, estimated that around 58,870 buildings were damaged or destroyed. The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) warned on Tuesday that food shortages were widespread, basic services had collapsed, and communication networks were largely severed in the worst-affected areas. “Community tensions are rising as access to assistance remains constrained,” the agency said, while the World Health Organization noted that health services were under “extreme pressure” and that low vaccination coverage raised the risk of outbreaks of measles and diphtheria.

More than 3,300 international rescue workers from 27 countries, coordinated by the United Nations, are assisting Venezuelan teams in the search for survivors. A 47-tonne shipment of humanitarian supplies from UNICEF arrived in the country on Tuesday, including emergency health kits and materials for safe childbirth and newborn care. Venezuelan authorities said that 6,461 people have been rescued in La Guaira since the earthquakes, but tens of thousands remain unaccounted for. The official death toll stands at 1,943, with 10,571 injured, though these figures are provisional and expected to rise as search operations continue.