Hope is fading of finding survivors among thousands buried under houses and schools by an earthquake in northern Pakistan.
Kashmiri women reached out for relief help arrives after three days following Saturday's deadly earthquake.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz told a news conference today the confirmed toll so far in Pakistan was 23,000 dead and 51,000 injured, while India has confirmed slightly over 1,200 deaths.
President Pervez Musharraf's government is seeking more international support for a disaster that officials in the worst-hit areas of Pakistani Kashmir and the North West Frontier Province said may have killed up to 40,000.
Another 2,000 people are feared to have been killed across the border in Indian Kashmir.
The United States pledged an initial $50 million for emergency aid. Several transport aircraft have been sent with relief supplies, heavy equipment and a humanitarian coordination team, and further flights were due to arrive on Tuesday.
European nations, Japan and Gulf Arab states also stepped forward with similar offers of support.
The deputy commissioner in the Indian Kashmir district of Karnah
Reporters flying over stricken areas saw villages and towns flattened. Nearly every building in Muzaffarabad, a once-pretty river town that is the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, was destroyed or damaged.
Rescuers, many of them desperate relatives scrabbling with their bare hands, worked through the rubble in the hope that they might be able to save trapped people.
Medical experts say an unhurt man can last for three days without water and a woman four days, which means time is running out.
"We are still looking for bodies in the debris," said the deputy commissioner in the Indian Kashmir district of Karnah. "It is a calamity that is overwhelming our resources."
The stench of decomposing bodies rose from beneath the collapsed homes in towns reached by journalists and relief teams, where a lack of drinking water and broken sewage systems posed a risk of contagious disease outbreaks.
Desperate people grabbed whatever they could from partially damaged shops, but there were also cases of looting. During the night, troops fired in the air to scare off a gang that had repeatedly raided a supply depot in Muzaffarabad.