The death toll from the devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Nepal inched above 4,000, the country's Home Ministry said Tuesday morning.
It was impossible to tabulate how many others remained missing amid the rubble, meaning the official number of confirmed dead could rise well above the 4,010 the ministry announced in the capital Kathmandu. More than 7,000 more people are known to have been injured, officials said.
The earthquake Saturday, which destroyed many historic cultural and religious sites and triggered an avalanche on Mount Everest, is Nepal's deadliest since an enormous quake killed more than 10,000 people in 1934.
International aid from 11 countries has finally begun arriving in a country with overflowing hospitals and scarce water, food and power, the government's chief secretary, Leela Mani Paudyal, said at a news conference in Kathmandu. But he acknowledged that rescue agencies are short on tents, blankets and medicine and said it would become more difficult to properly handle the rising number of corpses in the coming days.
"We have been dealing with fresh challenges as our capacity has been limited to meet the overwhelming demands," Paudyal said, according to the national newspaper Kantipur.
This article originally appeared on NBCNews.com.