Rescuers are painstakingly digging the last few inches of a tunnel in an attempt to reach a 5-year-old Moroccan boy who has been trapped in a dry, 104-foot well, for five days.

Earlier reports from the scene Saturday wrongly claimed the crews had reached the child, named Rayan, when medical staff were seen entering a tunnel which has been dug next to the well — but officials later clarified the medics went inside the tight space as a test. 

The boy’s condition was not immediately known. A camera sent down the shaft earlier in the week showed him lying on his side, Abdelhadi Temrani, one of the rescuers told media on the scene.  Earlier Saturday, he said they were unsure if the child was still alive.

Crews were just 35 inches from Rayan later on Saturday, Moroccan state television reported. Workers told reporters at the scene they were digging just 7 inches an hour. The delicate operation was complicated by the fact that the rocky, sandy soil was unstable and rescuers feared the tunnel could collapse. Though heavy machinery was used for days, the last portion of the excavation required digging by hand.

“We’re almost there,” one of the operation’s leaders, Abdesalam Makoudi, told reporters at the scene, Al Jazeera reported. He added: “tiredness is kicking in, but the whole rescue team is hanging on”.

An ambulance crew and a medivac helicopter were standing by as the rescue operation continued. Thousands of people surrounded the site in the small northern Morocco town of village of Ighran, shouting out prayers for Rayan and thanks to the rescue crews as night fell on the scene.

The child fell into the shaft while his father was working on the well on Tuesday. Attempts to reach him the way he fell in were unsuccessful because the shaft, roughly 8 inches wide, was too narrow, so the rescue operation brought in bulldozers to dig next to the well. That created a second shaft parallel to the first, and enabled rescuers to dig a horizontal tunnel to connect the and reach the boy.

Rescuers dropped water, oxygen and the camera used to monitor the boy down the shaft with a rope in prior days, but it was unclear if the camera was still working Saturday as rescuers fretted over his condition.