More than 300 people have been killed in Turkey and Syria after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the two countries in the early hours of Monday morning with tremors being felt in Lebanon, Greece, Palestine and the island of Cyprus.
Hundreds were injured and the toll was expected to rise as rescue workers and residents frantically searched for survivors under the rubble of crushed buildings in cities on both sides of the border.
The quake struck at 04:17 am local time (0117 GMT) at a depth of about 17.9 kilometres (11 miles), the US Geological Survey said, with a 6.7-magnitude aftershock striking 15 minutes later.
Television images showed shocked people in Turkey standing in the snow in their pyjamas, watching rescuers dig through the debris of damaged homes.
Buildings were levelled while many were still asleep. The number of confirmed casualties rose rapidly on Monday morning as rescue teams rushed to find survivors.
Turkey’s AFAD declared at least 76 people dead and 440 injured across seven of the country’s southern provinces adjacent to the border with northern Syria.
The Syrian health ministry said at least 230 people were killed and hundreds wounded in the provinces of Aleppo, Latakia, Hama and Tartus.
The death toll is expected to climb substantially as dozens of apartment blocks were flattened across major cities in the nighttime disaster.
The head of the Turkish Red Cross said it was mobilising resources for the region and urged people to evacuate damaged homes. Residents in the town of Pazarcık said they feared for those trapped under fallen buildings.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who will be under pressure to oversee an effective response to the disaster heading to a tightly contested 14 May election, said search and rescue teams had immediately been dispatched to the affected areas.
“We hope to get through this together as soon as possible and with the least damage, and we continue our work,” he tweeted.
The Turkish interior minister, Süleyman Soylu, said: “All our teams are on the alert. We have raised a level four alarm, which includes international aid.”
In Syria, early footage from local rescue teams suggested the province of Idlib in the north could be one of the worst affected areas, with the quake hitting a region already extensively damaged from over a decade of civil war and where millions are living in areas for those internally displaced.
Turkey is in one of the world’s most active earthquake zones, with land stretching over the Anatolian fault line in the north of the country that has caused large and destructive tremors.
Izmit and the surrounding Kocaeli region, close to Istanbul, was rocked by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake in 1999, the worst to hit Turkey in decades. The quake killed over 17,000 people, including at least 1,000 in Istanbul, amid widespread destruction.