A super typhoon that destroyed entire towns across the Philippines is believed to have killed more than 10,000 people, authorities said Sunday, which would make it the country's deadliest recorded natural disaster.

The horrifying new feared death toll from Super Typhoon Haiyan came as the United States pledged military help in the relief effort and as countless survivors across a huge swathe of the country remained without aid for a third day.

More than 600,000 people were evacuated as super typhoon Haiyan veered towards Vietnam, authorities said Sunday, after the storm smashed through the Philippines killing thousands and causing widespread devastation.

"We have evacuated more than 174,000 households, which is equivalent to more than 600,000 people," an official report by Vietnam's flood and storm control department said Sunday.

One of the most intense typhoons on record whipped the Philippines Friday, killing at least three people and terrifying millions as monster winds tore apart homes.

Super Typhoon Haiyan smashed into coastal communities on the central island of Samar, about 600 kilometers (370 miles) southeast of Manila, before dawn on Friday with maximum sustained winds of about 315 kilometers (195 miles) an hour.

The world's most powerful typhoon this year gained strength on Thursday as it swirled towards the Philippines, forcing mass evacuations across a vast swathe of the disaster-weary nation.

Authorities warned more than 12 million people were at risk from Typhoon Haiyan, which was generating wind gusts exceeding 330 kilometers (200 miles) an hour and set to hit on Friday morning.

Hong Kong's leader threatened sanctions against the Philippines on Tuesday over a row involving the deaths of its tourists in a 2010 hostage crisis in Manila.

The southern Chinese city is demanding a formal apology for the incident, which saw eight of its citizens killed and seven others wounded after negotiations broke down between Philippine authorities and a former police officer who hijacked a tour bus.

Security forces were on high alert across the Philippines on Monday as millions of voters went to the polls to choose village leaders, with 22 people killed in pre-election violence.

Poll officials said about 336,000 village chief and councilor posts were up for grabs in the country's dynamic but corrupt brand of democracy, where politicians are infamous for employing private armies to kill or intimidate rivals.

The United Nations appealed for $46.8 million in international aid on Friday for the hundreds of thousands now living in tents after a big earthquake in the disaster-prone Philippines.

A 7.1-magnitude quake last week flattened homes, schools, clinics and other vital infrastructure killing more than 200 people.

Communist insurgents killed nine soldiers Monday in landmine ambushes in the southern Philippines, the military said.

The attacks, among the bloodiest by the New People's Army (NPA) in months, also left five soldiers wounded, a military statement said.

The death toll from a killer quake in the central Philippines is likely to approach 200 as rescue teams focused on finding dead bodies buried under landslides and fallen structures, an official said Sunday.

A total of 185 deaths have been confirmed so far from the 7.1 quake that shook the tourist island of Bohol on Tuesday, toppling bridges, shattering roads, causing landslides and reducing historic churches to rubble.

A self-proclaimed Philippine sultan whose followers launched a bloody incursion into the Malaysian state of Sabah earlier this year died of organ failure in a Manila hospital on Sunday, his wife said.

Jamalul Kiram III, 75 -- who described himself as the "Sultan of Sulu" after a group of islands in the southern Philippines -- passed away at a government hospital but remained defiant to the end, his wife, Fatima Kiram said.