More than 140 trucks carrying desperately-needed aid have crossed into rebel-held northwestern Syria from Turkey since a giant earthquake devastated the region last week, the United Nations said Friday.

"Since February 9 up to last night, we had a total of 143 trucks going through the Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salama border crossings," Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, told reporters in Geneva. 

Syrian refugees living in Turkey sought to get back to their war-torn country on Friday after swathes of their adopted home were destroyed by last week's earthquake.

Hundreds queued at the Cilvegozu border crossing in southeast Turkey following the quake, which has killed more than 41,000 people and displaced millions across both countries.

Five Syrian children and their parents died on Friday in a fire that struck a Turkish home they moved to after surviving last week's earthquake, local media reported.

The family had relocated to the central region of Konya from the southeastern Turkish city of Nurdagi, which was badly hit by the February 6 quake, to stay with relatives.

A Palestinian-backed U.N. resolution that could be put to a vote in the Security Council early next week would demand an immediate halt to all Israeli settlement activities, condemn Israeli attempts to annex settlements and outposts, "and call for their immediate reversal."

In Washington, the State Department said it believed the resolution as drafted was "unhelpful," but declined to say if it would veto the document or try to water it down to avoid a contentious vote.

Amid chilly temperatures and heavy security, thousands of black-clad pilgrims from across Iraq marched Thursday in the annual procession in marking the death of a Shiite saint.

Pilgrims traditionally travel on foot to the shrine and burial site of Imam Moussa al-Kadhim, the seventh of 12 Shiite imams who died in a Baghdad prison in the eighth century. The procession leads to the site in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Kadimiyah. Participants wear black, with some carrying out self-flagellation to publicly express their mourning.

The United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Syria said Thursday that the country's death toll from last week's deadly earthquake is likely to rise further as teams scramble to remove rubble in hard-hit areas.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Muhannad Hadi defended the U.N.'s response to the disaster, which many in Syria have criticized as slow and inadequate.

Syria could face dangerous outbreaks of disease in the wake of last week's devastating earthquake if hundreds of thousands of displaced people do not get permanent housing soon, the Red Cross' global chief said Thursday, as Syrians struggle to receive humanitarian aid amid the mounting crisis.

Jagan Chapagain, who is Secretary-General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said families staying in makeshift shelters without adequate heating urgently need permanent housing.

Israeli forces demolished the home on Thursday of a Palestinian behind a deadly shooting in the occupied West Bank, as tensions and unrest surge in the region.

The military said the demolition was carried out after an Israeli court rejected appeals to spare the residence. The home, in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron, was demolished in a controlled explosion. A flash and then grey tufts of smoke were seen emerging from the apartment in the early morning hours.

Israel's foreign minister arrived in Kyiv on Thursday, the first public visit to Ukraine's capital by a senior Israeli official since Russia's invasion last year.

Eli Cohen's visit came just before the first anniversary of Russian's invasion of Ukraine, and as western nations seek to increase aid to the country.

U.S. forces shot down an Iranian-made drone flying over a base housing American troops in northeastern Syria, the U.S. military said Wednesday.

The incident comes more than a week after a deadly 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked Turkey and Syria, followed by a significant de-escalation of violence across the war-torn country.