New Venezuela Crisis Looms As UN Sends 10,000 Body Bags

It was still dark in the early hours of Tuesday morning as Jordanian rescue teams pulled a 3-year-old boy from the bones of a collapsed building in northern Venezuela.

Dust packed onto his dark curls, his tiny body was quickly wrapped in a blanket and rushed away from the destruction, video showed, six days after two 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes struck the South American country within just 39 seconds of one another.

Now a week on, hope of finding more survivors is vanishing, even while search and rescue operations officially continue and aid teams cling on to the final glimmers of optimism. The United Nations is buying 10,000 body bags, according to the organization’s representative in Venezuela-a number more than five times higher than the current official death toll.

But there’s a new danger lurking on the horizon, humanitarian teams warn.

Venezuela’s health system was already in pieces before the disaster, but with more than 5,000 people injured and over 12,000 displaced, those who were yanked from the wreckage are in danger of losing their lives because they can’t get to medical care.

Flooding Venezuela with medicines, blood supplies and even internet access for doctors and nurses is the top priority now, said Rafael Velasquez Garcia, who is heading up the earthquake relief effort for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a charity that operates in more than 40 countries worldwide.

“Being pulled from the rubble is only the first hurdle; surviving the aftermath is a secondary crisis,” said Carolina De Jesús, the director of U.S.-based non-governmental organization Project HOPE in Venezuela.

Hospitals ‘Already Stretched Very Thin’

Some of the hospitals in northern Venezuela have reached 900 percent capacity, Velasquez told Newsweek.

“This is why we’re prioritizing health,” he added.

The twin quakes were the largest to strike Venezuela in more than a century, sending hundreds of buildings tumbling toward already poorly maintained roads and emergency crews scrambling toward La Guaira, the hardest-hit state described by Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodriguez, as a “disaster zone.”

Humanitarian teams on the ground say power outages plague entire areas of the city of La Guaira, water networks have been smashed, and phones lines are dead. Roads to hospitals are blocked off by debris.

But the problems started before 6 p.m. on June 24. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans left the country in the past 10 years, and U.N. experts said even before the earthquakes, one in four residents needed humanitarian aid for basic needs, including health care.

Many of the Venezuelans who left their home in the past decade went in search of medical care and health services, Velasquez said.

In Yaracuy, the state where the earthquake first struck, an estimated 99 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 2021. For La Guaira, this figure stood at 94 percent.

“This is a system that was already stretched very thin,” Velasquez said.

Several camp hospitals have sprung up over the past week, and up to 38 health facilities have been damaged or destroyed. One hospital in Caracas and another in La Guaira have completely collapsed, De Jesús told Newsweek.

The remaining medical centers are overcrowded and surgeries are being delayed, international groups say.All of the health facilities in La Guaira have been “severely impacted,” and there are no available beds at all, De Jesús said.

Half of all the health centers Project HOPE has come across have damage to their roofs, floors or walls, and more than 40 percent have structural damage to beams or columns, De Jesús added. Nearly 60 percent of facilities don’t have power or access to clean water.

The morgues, meanwhile, cannot cope with the number of bodies they are receiving. Health workers are among the estimated 50,000 people still reported missing by their loved ones as hundreds of aftershocks run through the country.

Velasquez says the IRC is trying to get as many mobile health units into northern Venezuela as possible, doctors and first-aiders able to go toward the survivors most in need of medical help, rather than the other way around. These may be near churches, or stadiums, or schools.

Local doctors and nurses are pitching up in football fields-sometimes only carrying a first-aid kit in a van-to triage hundreds of people injured in the quakes, Velasquez said. These people may be sat, dazed, without access to food, water or toilets.

Under these conditions, experts warn, disease will spread. Around 40 percent of survivors in Caracas, La Guaira, and three other Venezuelan regions are on the streets, or sheltering in public places like schools and churches. Children are camping out, alone, on the side of the road and in improvised camps.

With vaccination rates before the quakes low, Venezuela’s population is at risk of diseases ripping through the country, like measles, malaria, or yellow fever. With clean water supplies uncertain, the quake-hit areas could be a breeding ground for cholera.

“Rescued survivors remain in grave danger,” said De Jesús.

2026 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.

This story was originally published July 1, 2026 at 10:26 AM.