Torrential rainstorms interrupted efforts to deliver relief supplies to devastated areas of Pakistani-held Kashmir today as villagers trekking down from cut-off mountain villages described scenes of death and despair.

The rain hit Muzaffarabad in the early afternoon, forcing the cancellation of helicopter flights that had been ferrying aid into the city and evacuating the wounded. An AFP correspondent reported that the rubble-ridden streets were turned into a river of slush.

According to the Pakistani Government 33,000 people were killed in the country by Saturday's 7.6-magnitude quake. On the Indian side of the Kashmir ceasefire line, the death toll has climbed past 1,000.

Meanwhile, Kashmiri militants fighting Indian rule announced a temporary, unilateral ceasefire in parts of the disputed Himalayan region. United Jihad Council, a loose alliance of about a dozen militant groups, also called on its fighters to take part in relief activities in the region.

"We are temporarily suspending our activities in the areas hit by the earthquake," a spokesman for the group told Reuters.

Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-held Kashmir, sits in the bottom of the mountainous Kashmir valley and can suffer from violently unpredictable weather. Officials said thunder and hailstorms had spread out across the affected region.

Villagers reaching the city from parts of the Kashmir mountains still inaccessible to relief workers spoke of widespread devastation. "There are dead bodies everywhere and those who are injured don’t have a drop of water," Nasar Ahmad, who was carrying his injured young niece on his back into Muzaffarabad, told Reuters.

Thousands of British families directly affected by the earthquake are still waiting for news of their relatives as communities rallied round to raise money for the emergency appeal. In Birmingham alone, 90,000 people are thought to originate from the disaster zone.

The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), which covers the UK’s leading aid organisations and helped raise £300 million after the Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean, is urging the public to dig deep and give to its Asia Quake Appeal.

With winter just six weeks away, the United Nations said that 2.5 million people near the Pakistan-India border need shelter.

About ten trucks packed with aid supplies were arriving in Muzaffarabad this morning, with victims scuffling for badly-needed food and blankets. Three days after the earthquake left virtually all the city's 600,000 population homeless, it was the first major delivery of aid.

Two or three police looked on helplessly as more than 200 people raided a stock of food arranged by relief workers at a football field near Muzaffarabad’s centre - one of six designated aid distribution points.

One man made off with a big sack of sugar, another left on a motorised rickshaw with a big crate of drinking water.

"Relief activity has started on a massive level," said Masood-ur Rehman, the city's deputy commissioner. He said that two army brigades would start clearing roads and debris in the city on Tuesday.

The UN's World Food Programme began a major airlift of emergency supplies and international donors stepped up their pledges, including $20 million from Japan.

General Shaukat Sultan, a Pakistan army spokesman, said that a total of 30 helicopters, including eight US military choppers diverted from the war in neighbouring Afghanistan, were supplying food, water, medicine and other items to quake victims. Two more German and four Afghan helicopters were due in the region later today.

Even India planned to send a planeload of food, tents and medicine after Pakistan set aside its often-bitter rivalry with its nuclear neighbour and said that it would accept Delhi’s aid. Islamabad has, however, declined an offer of Indian helicopters.

Rescue teams, including Britons, Germans and Turks, used high-tech cameras and lifting gear to search for survivors under piles of concrete, steel and wood.

In the small northern town of Balakot, where at least three schools crumbled in the quake, Pakistani troops aided by French experts on Monday rescued 40 children and retrieved 60 bodies from one of the schools.

Workers resumed their search early Tuesday and had pulled out more bodies, and were trying to reach buried classrooms where more children might still be alive.

In North West Frontier Province, at least 3,500 people have died and more than 8,500 are injured, and many areas have yet to be reached by rescue teams, an official of the crisis management office said.

But he said that about 10,000-12,000 people may have died according to unconfirmed reports. "We know that several villages in Mansehra district were completely wiped out, and many among the dead were schoolchildren," he said.

Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, toured Indian-controlled Kashmir today and pledged five billion rupees (£66 million) in reconstruction funds.

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