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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The staggering scope of Haiti’s nightmare came into sharper focus Monday as authorities estimated 200,000 dead and 1.5 million homeless in the heart of this luckless land, where injured survivors still died in the streets, doctors pleaded for help and looters slashed at one another in the rubble.

The world pledged more money, food, medicine and police. About 2,000 U.S. Marines steamed into nearby waters, and former President Bill Clinton, special United Nations envoy, flew in to offer support.

But hour by hour, the unmet needs of hundreds of thousands grew.

“Have we been abandoned? Where is the food?” shouted one man, Jean Michel Jeantet, in a downtown street.

The U.N. World Food Program, or WFP, said it expected to boost operations from feeding 67,000 people Sunday to 97,000 Monday. But it needs 100 million prepared meals over the next 30 days, and it appealed for more government donations.

“I know that aid cannot come soon enough,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said in New York after returning from Haiti.

“Unplug the bottlenecks,” he urged.

Aid deliveries get priority

In one step to reassure frustrated aid groups, the U.S. military agreed to give aid deliveries priority over military flights at the now U.S.-run airport, the WFP announced in Rome. The Americans’ handling of civilian flights had angered some humanitarian officials.

Looting and violence continued to rage. Hundreds clambered over the broken walls of shops to grab anything they could — including toothpaste, now valuable for lining nostrils against the stench of Port-au-Prince’s dead. Police fired into the air as young men fought one another over rum and beer with broken bottles and machetes.

Hard-pressed medical teams sometimes had to take time away from quake victims to deal with gunshot wounds, said Loris de Filippi of Doctors Without Borders. In the Montrissant neighborhood, Red Cross doctors working in shipping containers and saying they “cannot cope” lost 50 patients over two days, said international Red Cross spokesman Simon Schorno.

The latest casualty report, from the European Commission citing Haitian government figures, doubled previous estimates of the dead from the magnitude-7.0 quake to approximately 200,000, with about 70,000 bodies recovered and trucked off to mass graves. If accurate, that would make Haiti’s catastrophe nearly as deadly as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed an estimated 230,000 people in a dozen countries.

European Commission analysts estimate 250,000 were injured and 1.5 million were made homeless. Masses are living under plastic sheets in makeshift camps and in dust-covered automobiles, or had taken to the road seeking out relatives in the countryside.

Years or decades to rebuild

An impoverished nation long at the bottom of the heap, Haiti will need years or decades of expanded aid to rebuild. For the moment, however, front-line relief workers want simply to get food and water to the hungry and thirsty.

The delays aren’t “so much about food supplies as logistics,” said Brian Feagans, a spokesman for the aid group CARE. The priorities are clearing roads, ensuring security at U.N. food-distribution points, getting Port-au-Prince’s seaport working again and bringing in more trucks and helicopters, WFP executive director Josette Sheeran said in Rome.

The U.N. humanitarian chief, John Holmes, said in New York that not all 15 U.N. food-distribution points were up and running yet. “That’s a question of people, trucks, fuel, but the aid is scaling up very rapidly,” he said.

American forces were to be reinforced by 2,000 Marines arriving off Haiti’s shores aboard three amphibious landing ships.

Getting clean water into people’s hands was still a dire concern. “People can survive a few days without food, but we must try to avoid major outbreaks of waterborne disease,” Feagans said.

Clinton and his accompanying daughter, Chelsea, pitched in, helping unload cases of bottled water from their plane to a U.N. truck.