MUZAFFARABAD, Oct 20: The devastating earthquake in Pakistan’s northern mountains is turning into one of the toughest relief operations the world has ever known, according to international aid officials.

“It’s actually scary if you see the situation in the villages. You feel a sense of urgency you’ve not felt before, even in the tsunami,” the World Food Programme’s Mia Turner said on Thursday.

“This is probably the greatest logistical challenge faced by an emergency operation,” she said.

While the official death toll in the earthquake — 49,739 in Pakistan and 1,300 in held Kashmir — is only about a quarter of that in last year’s Indian Ocean tsunami, the number is expected to rise substantially.

Large areas have not been reached and no one knows how many more were killed in the high hills.

UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland, warning that the death toll could double, said the Nato military alliance should launch a massive airlift to evacuate the tens of thousands of people trapped in Azad Kashmir before winter set in.

“We need a second Berlin air-bridge, and if they could do that in the end of the 1940s — set up in no time a lifeline to millions of people — we should be able to do that in 2005,” he told a news conference in Geneva, referring to the US airlift set up in 1949 to keep Soviet-blockaded West Berlin supplied.

“There are still too few helicopters to reach more than 1,000 remote villages with life-saving supplies that children urgently need,” Unicef Director Ann Veneman said in a statement.

Aid workers say they have only three, maybe four, weeks left to distribute tents to shelter people from the Himalayan winter.

“We have a short window of opportunity and a short few weeks to really get this into high gear,” Ms Turner said. “Shelter is crucial and if people don’t get that soon there will be a crisis of a different kind — people will start dying of exposure.”

HOPES RAISED: Hopes have been raised by a dramatic agreement by Pakistan and India to allow help for thousands of earthquake victims to flow across the heavily militarized line dividing Kashmir.