Residents in a northwest Syrian town discovered a crying infant whose mother appears to have given birth to her while buried underneath the rubble of a five-storey apartment building levelled by this week’s devastating earthquake.

The newborn girl was found with her umbilical cord still connected to her mother, Afraa Abu Hadiya, who was found dead, they said. The baby was the only member of her family to survive the building collapse Monday in the small town of Jinderis, next to the Turkish border, relative Ramadan Sleiman told the Associated Press.

The baby girl was born under the rubble after an earthquake hit Syria and Turkey. Photo / AP

The rescuers found the baby more than 10 hours after the quake struck. A neighbour cut the cord, and she and others rushed with the baby to a children’s hospital in the nearby town of Afrin, where she has been kept in an incubator, said the physician treating the baby, Dr Hani Maarouf.

The baby’s body temperature had fallen to 35C and she had bruises, including a large one on her back, but she is in stable condition, he said. Maarouf said he believed the baby had been born about three hours before being found, given how far her temperature had dropped.

Monday’s pre-dawn 7.8 magnitude earthquake, followed by multiple aftershocks, caused widespread destruction across southern Turkey and northern Syria. The death toll has surpassed 5000 and continues to mount with more bodies discovered.

Jinderis, in the rebel-held enclave of northwest Syria, was hard hit in the quake, with multiple buildings that collapsed.

In another dramatic rescue Monday evening in the same town, a toddler was pulled alive from the wreckage of a collapsed building. Video from the White Helmets, the emergency service in the region, shows a rescuer digging through crushed concrete amid twisted metal until the little girl, named Nour, appeared. The girl, still half buried, looks up dazedly as they tell her, “Dad is here, don’t be scared. … Talk to your dad, talk.”

People search through the rubble of collapsed buildings where a newborn girl was found in the town of Jinderis, Aleppo province, Syria. Photo / Ghaith Alsayed, AP

A rescuer cradled her head in his hands and tenderly wiped dust from around her eyes before she was pulled out.

The death toll from the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria has passed 6000 amid the search for more survivors.

With the damage spread over a wide area, the massive relief operation often struggled to reach devastated towns, and voices that had been crying out from the rubble fell silent.

”We could hear their voices, they were calling for help,” said Ali Silo, whose two relatives could not be saved in the Turkish town of Nurdagi. In the end, it was left to Silo, a Syrian who arrived from Hama a decade ago, and other residents to recover the bodies and those of two other victims.

Monday’s magnitude 7.8 quake and a cascade of strong aftershocks cut a swath of destruction that stretched hundreds of kilometres across southeastern Turkey and neighboring Syria, toppling thousands of buildings and heaping more misery on a region shaped by Syria’s 12-year civil war and refugee crisis.

An aerial view of the destruction in Hatay city centre, southern Turkey, where search teams and emergency aid from around the world poured into Turkey and Syria as rescuers working in freezing temperatures dug 'sometimes with their bare hands' through the remains of buildings. Photo / IHA via AP

One temblor that followed the first registered at magnitude 7.5, powerful in its own right.

Unstable tangled piles of metal and concrete made the search efforts perilous, while freezing temperatures made them ever more urgent, as worries grew about how long those trapped could survive in the cold.

More than 8000 people have been pulled from the debris in Turkey alone, and some 380,000 have taken refuge in government shelters or hotels, said Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay.

- Ghaith Alsayed and Bassem Mroue, AP