Tens of thousands feared dead in Haiti quake; 8 Israelis missing

Haitians piled bodies along the devastated streets of their capital Wednesday after the strongest earthquake to hit the poor Caribbean nation in more than 200 years crushed thousands of structures, from schools and shacks to the National Palace and the United Nations peacekeeping headquarters. Untold numbers were still trapped. Officials said thousands of people were dead.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry on Wednesday prepared a rescue team for departure to the disaster-stricken country, saying later that though two Israelis initially regarded as missing had been located, eight Israelis remained unaccounted for in Haiti, among them the daughter of late Israeli peace activist Abie Nathan. The rescue team includes elite army corps engineers and medical corps ready to deploy field hospital, the Israeli consulate in New York reported.

Haitian President Rene Preval said he believed thousands were killed in the quake, and the scope of the destruction prompted other officials to give even higher estimates. Leading Sen. Youri Latortue told The Associated Press that 500,000 could be dead, although he acknowledged that nobody really knows.

"Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed," Preval told the Miami Herald. "There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them."

"Even the main prison in the capital fell down, and there are reports of escaped inmates," United Nations humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva.

The head of the UN peacekeeping mission was missing and the Roman Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince was dead.

"The cathedral, the archbishop's office, all the big churches, the seminaries have been reduced to rubble," Archbishop Bernardito Auza, the apostolic envoy to Haiti, told the Vatican news agency FIDES.

The parking lot of the Hotel Villa Creole was a triage center. People sat with injuries and growing infections by the side of rubble-strewn roads, hoping that doctors and aid would come.

The international Red Cross said a third of Haiti's 9 million people may need emergency aid and that it would take a day or two for a clear picture of the damage to emerge.

At first light Wednesday, a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter evacuated four critically injured U.S. Embassy staff to the hospital on the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the military has been detaining suspected terrorists.

President Barack Obama promised an all-out rescue and humanitarian effort, adding that the U.S. commitment to its hemispheric neighbor will be "unwavering."

"We have to be there for them in their hour of need," Obama said.

A small contingent of U.S. ground troops could be on their way soon, although it was unclear whether they would be used for security operations or humanitarian efforts. Gen. Douglas Fraser, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, said roughly 2,000 Marines as part of an expeditionary unit might be deployed aboard a large-deck amphibious ship. Fraser said the ship could provide medical help.

Obama said he has ordered the U.S. government to provide fast, coordinated help to save lives, saying military overflights had already begun assessing damage, emergency supplies were being sent and search and rescue teams would be arriving on Wednesday and Thursday.

"We are just now beginning to learn the extent of the devastation, but the reports and images that we've seen of collapsed hospitals, crumbled homes and men and women carrying their injured neighbors through the streets are truly heart-wrenching," Obama told reporters.

Other nations - from Iceland to Venezuela - said they would start sending in aid workers and rescue teams. Cuba said its existing field hospitals in Haiti had already treated hundreds of victims. The United Nations said Port-au-Prince's main airport was fully operational and open to relief flights.

Aftershocks continued to rattle the capital of 2 million people as women covered in dust clawed out of debris, wailing. Stunned people wandered the streets holding hands. Thousands gathered in public squares to sing hymns.

People pulled bodies from collapsed homes, covering them with sheets by the side of the road. Passersby lifted the sheets to see if loved ones were underneath. Outside a crumbled building the bodies of five children and three adults lay in a pile.

The airport in Port-au-Prince has been closed since the quake hit on Tuesday evening, but Israel decided to send the team with the hope that they would be able to land by the time they arrive.

Israeli ambassador to the Dominican Republic, Amos Radian, is scheduled to join the rescue team whose purpose is to gauge the best way Israel can assist with the crisis and decide on the most immediate needs.

IsraAID also planned to send a 12-man search-and-rescue team, which includes emergency medical staff.

Many will have to help their own staff as well as stricken Haitians. Taiwan's Foreign Ministry said its embassy was destroyed and the ambassador hospitalized. Spain said its embassy was badly damaged.

"Haiti has moved to center of the world's thoughts and the world's compassion," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said.

Tens of thousands of people lost their homes as buildings that were flimsy and dangerous even under normal conditions collapsed in the shaking. Nobody offered an estimate of the dead, but the numbers were clearly enormous.

"The hospitals cannot handle all these victims," Dr. Louis-Gerard Gilles, a former senator, said as he helped survivors. "Haiti needs to pray. We all need to pray together."

A young American aid worker was trapped for about 10 hours under the rubble of her mission house before she was rescued by her husband, who told CBS's The Early Show that he drove 160 kilometers to Port-au-Prince to find her when he learned of the quake.

Frank Thorp said he dug for more than an hour to free his wife, Jillian, and a co-worker, from under about a foot of concrete.

Even relatively wealthy neighborhoods were devastated.

An Associated Press videographer saw a wrecked hospital where people screamed for help in Petionville, a hillside district that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians as well as the poor.

At a destroyed four-story apartment building, a girl of about 16 stood atop a car, trying to peer inside while several men pulled at a foot sticking from rubble. She said her family was inside.

"A school near here collapsed totally," Petionville resident Ken Michel said Wednesday after surveying the damage. "We don't know if there were any children inside." He said many seemingly sturdy homes nearby were split apart.

The UN's 9,000 peacekeepers in Haiti, many of whom are from Brazil, were distracted from aid efforts by their own tragedy: Many spent the night hunting for survivors in the ruins of their headquarters.

"It would appear that everyone who was in the building, including my friend Hedi Annabi, the United Nations' Secretary General's special envoy, and everyone with him and around him, are dead," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Wednesday, speaking on RTL radio.

UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy would not confirm that Annabi was dead but said he was among more than 100 people missing in the rubble of its headquarters. He said only about 10 people had been pulled out, many of them badly injured. Fewer than five bodies had been pulled from the rubble, he said.

Brazil's army said at least four of its peacekeepers were killed and five injured, while Jordan's official news agency said three of its peacekeepers were killed and 33 injured. A state newspaper in China said eight Chinese peacekeepers were known dead and 10 were missing - though officials later said the information was not confirmed.

Much of the National Palace pancaked on itself, but Haiti's ambassador to Mexico, Robert Manuel, said President Rene Preval and his wife survived the earthquake. He had no details.

The quake struck at 4:53 P.M., centered 15 kilometers west of Port-au-Prince at a depth of only 8 kilometers, the U.S. Geological Survey said. USGS geophysicist Kristin Marano called it the strongest earthquake since 1770 in what is now Haiti.

Most Haitians are desperately poor, and after years of political instability the country has no real construction standards. In November 2008, following the collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated about 60 percent of buildings were shoddily built and unsafe in normal circumstances.

Tuesday's quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, and in eastern Cuba, but no major damage was reported in either place.

With electricity knocked out in many places and phone service erratic, it was nearly impossible for Haitian or foreign officials to get full details of the devastation.

"Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken," said Henry Bahn, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official visiting Port-au-Prince. "The sky is just gray with dust."

President Barack Obama offered prayers for the people of Haiti and said the U.S. stood ready to help. Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said a disaster response team would fly in Wednesday.

Edwidge Danticat, an award-winning Haitian-American author was unable to contact relatives in Haiti. She sat with family and friends at her home in Miami, looking for news on the Internet and watching TV news reports.

"You want to go there, but you just have to wait," she said. "Life is already so fragile in Haiti, and to have this on such a massive scale, it's unimaginable how the country will be able to recover from this."

American Jewish World Service collecting donations for Haiti aid

The American Jewish World Service (AJWS) is collecting donations in response to Tuesday?s massive earthquake in Haiti, which registered a 7.3 on the Richter scale. Donations to AJWS?s 'Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund,' which can be made at www.ajws.org/haitiearthquake, will help AJWS?s network of grantees in Haiti to meet the urgent needs of the population based on real-time, on-the-ground assessments.

?We are assessing where the gaps in service are and putting a process in place to help specific communities that might not be immediately served otherwise,? said AJWS vice president for programs Aaron Dorfman. ?Because of the economic and political situation in Haiti, disasters like this have devastating consequences throughout the country. Our long-standing partnerships with grassroots organizations in Haiti allow us to reach the poorest and most remote populations with the speed necessary to save lives.?

Founded in 1985, American Jewish World Service (AJWS) earned its eighth four-star rating from Charity Navigator in 2009 as well as an ?A? rating from the American Institute of Philanthropy.

	A Haitian man carrying his daughter following Tuesday's massive earthquake, which devastated much of Port-au-Prince.
	Photo by: (Getty Images)