The privately-owned Binaliw landfill collapsed on Thursday while 110 workers were on site, officials said.

Archival said in a Facebook post on Saturday morning: “Authorities confirmed the presence of detected signs of life in specific areas, requiring continued careful excavation and the deployment of a more advanced 50-ton crane.”

Relatives of those missing have been waiting anxiously for any news of their whereabouts. More than 30 people, all workers at the landfill, are thought to be missing.

“We are just hoping that we can get someone alive… We are racing against time, that’s why our deployment is 24/7,” Cebu City councillor Dave Tumulak, chairman of the city’s disaster council, told news agency AFP.

Jerahmey Espinoza, whose husband is missing, told news agency Reuters at the site on Saturday: “They haven’t seen him or located him ever since the disaster happened. We’re still hopeful that he’s alive.”

The cause of the collapse remains unclear, but Cebu City councillor Joel Garganera previously said it was likely the result of poor waste management practices.

Operators had been cutting into the mountain, digging the soil out and then piling garbage to form another mountain of waste, Garganera told local newspaper The Freeman on Friday.

The Binaliw landfill covers an area of about 15 hectares (37 acres).

Landfills are common in major Philippine cities like Cebu, which is the trading centre and transportation gateway of the Visayas, the archipelago nation’s central islands.

“One of the things the United States gets out of this will be even lower energy prices,” Trump said in Friday’s meeting at the White House.

But the oil bosses present expressed caution.

Exxon’s chief executive Darren Woods said: “We have had our assets seized there twice and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen and what is currently the state.”

“Today it’s uninvestable.”

Venezuela has had a complicated relationship with international oil firms since oil was discovered in its territory more than 100 years ago.

Chevron is the last remaining major American oil firm still operating in the country.

A handful of companies from other countries, including Spain’s Repsol and Italy’s Eni, both of which were represented at the White House meeting, are also active.

Trump said his administration would decide which firms would be allowed to operate.

“You’re dealing with us directly. You’re not dealing with Venezuela at all. We don’t want you to deal with Venezuela,” he said.

The US and its partner forces fired more than 90 precision munitions at more than 35 targets in an operation that involved more than 20 aircraft, an official told CBS News, the BBC’s US partner.

The official added that aircraft including F-15Es, A-10s, AC-130Js, MQ-9s and Jordanian F-16s had taken part in the strikes.

The location of the strikes and the extent of any casualties is not yet clear.

“We will never forget, and never relent,” Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X on Saturday in reference to the military action.

The Trump administration first announced Operation Hawkeye Strike in December after an IS gunman killed two US soldiers and a US civilian interpreter in an ambush in Palmyra, located in the centre of Syria.

“This is not the beginning of a war – it is a declaration of vengeance,” Hegseth said when announcing the operation in December.

“The United States of America, under President Trump’s leadership, will never hesitate and never relent to defend our people.”

Prior to the latest strikes on Saturday, US forces killed or captured nearly 25 IS group members in 11 missions between 20 December and 29 December as part of Operation Hawkeye Strike, Centcom said.

In the operation’s first mission on 19 December, US and Jordanian forces carried out a “massive strike” against the IS group, deploying fighter jets, attack helicopters and artillery to strike “more than 70 targets at multiple locations across central Syria”, according to Centcom.

That operation, it said, “employed more than 100 precision munitions” targeting known IS infrastructure and weapons sites.