The quake-hit areas wore a deserted look ahead of Eid-ul-Fitr. International and Pakistani helicopters made renewed attempts to get to devastated areas that were cutoff by the October 8 quake, which killed more than 73,000 people in one of the biggest disasters of the last century.
Aid workers and Pakistani military officials have blamed difficult terrain and adverse weather as well as logistical problems and a shortage of aircraft for failing to reach some of the estimated 2,000 quake-hit villages.
"The problem is of means of transportation," Army Brigadier Zafar Ali told AFP in Muzaffarabad. "That's why we are trying and appealing to the international community to come and help us with choppers."
The United Nations has appealed to the rich nations to donate more cash, saying the world body has received less than a quarter of what it needs for immediate emergency aid.
"What is Eid?" Nasima Bibi, whose 18-year-old son Mustafa died in the quake, said as she cleared the young man's simple grave.
"I lost my house, I lost my eldest son who was going to be breadwinner because my husband is ill. What does this Eid mean for me?" she told AFP, breaking down in tears.
The day before Eid is normally one of the busiest of the year, with people descending from the nearby mountains to shop for food, sweets and clothes and to get their hair cut, while women decorate their hands with henna.
Instead many residents in the city, where tens of thousands died, said they would be too busy scrabbling for relief goods to celebrate the festival.
"We will not celebrate Eid simply because most of our brethren in the town have suffered," said elderly Ejaz Hussein, whose house is too badly damaged to live in. "There are too many losses, physical and financial. We can't celebrate with any kind of fanfare."
Many of the open-air venues where people would traditionally offer Eid prayers are now the sites of tent villages. The quake left more than three million homeless and hundreds of thousands still have no shelter.
However, 1,000 students from the youth wing of Jamaat-i-Islami came to Muzaffarabad on Thursday to distribute gifts and toys to child survivors.
In Indian occupied Kashmir, where more than 1,300 people died in the 7.6-magnitude quake, people said they would mark Eid-ul-Fitr by praying they survive the freezing months ahead rather than in celebration.
"To celebrate Eid we require money to buy new clothes, meat and other items. I do not have a single paisa now," said Akbar Din, a farm labourer from quake-flattened Salamabad village, 105km north-west of occupied Srinagar.
Relief efforts got a small boost on Thursday when the Indian occupation army said the so-called "peace bus" road linking occupied Srinagar and Muzaffarabad has been reopened after it was blocked by landslides, allowing faster delivery of supplies.
Nato said that five C-130 Hercules cargo aircraft and a Boeing 747 jumbo arrived in Pakistan late Wednesday, bringing the total amount of relief goods flown into the country to more than 1,000 tonnes.
The alliance had flown 62 flights to date in what it describes as an "air-bridge".
In the meantime, sickness is increasing among the earthquake survivors, a UN official said on Thursday, after the government dramatically increased the death toll from the disaster.
"The situation is quite desperate," the chief UN disaster co-ordinator, Rashid Khalikov, told Reuters in Muzaffarabad. "We have noticed a sharp increase in acute respiratory infection that can lead to pneumonia," he said.
He said seven deaths from waterborne diarrhoea had been reported from a town in NWFP, although there had been no reports of deaths from exposure.
The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the number of reported tetanus cases had increased to 113 from 104 in three days and 22 people had died.
The UN Children's Fund is launching a measles vaccination drive in coming days to stop its spread in tent settlements.
"What worries us most is the dramatic increase in vulnerability of the population, and there are not so many coping mechanisms that they have to deal with this," Khalikov said.
He said the top priority was people living at 5,000 feet, and there were at least 150,000 of them in two areas of NWFP alone.
It was unclear how many people in all might be heading to lower, warmer areas as the harsh winter sets in, he said.
"It is very difficult to plan. It has never happened before. We can only guess whether they will come down or not and when they will come down," Khalikov said.
The United Nations has complained that it has received only about 24 percent of its appeal for $550 million for emergency relief.
The UN's World Food Programme (WFP), which says 2.3 million people need emergency food, said that unless the money is forthcoming it cannot pay for the helicopters needed to position winter food stocks for survivors over the next four weeks.
"It's a disaster," WFP Chief Co-ordinator in Muzaffarabad Keith Ursel said.
"At first there will be a reduction in the number of flights. When the fuel tank is empty your car stops, so we're not stupid, we'll try to keep some running all the time," he said.
A huge Russian-built MI-26 helicopter joined the relief effort on Thursday, airlifting a bulldozer suspended from a cable to help the army engineers in rebuilding a road swept away in a landslide triggered by the quake.
The aircraft, capable of lifting up to 20 tonnes, was due to carry three bulldozers to road crews, an army spokesman said.