t least 360 people have been killed and hundreds injured after a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit southern Turkey and northern Syria early on Monday, authorities said.
The huge quake toppled buildings and triggering a frantic search for survivors in the rubble in cities and towns.
The epicentre was near the Turkish city of Gaziantep, a major Turkish provincial capital of more than two million people.
Millions of people across Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus and Israel felt the earthquake.
In the Turkish city of Adana, one resident said three buildings near his home collapsed.
“I don’t have the strength anymore,” one survivor could be heard calling out from beneath the rubble, as rescue workers tried to reach him, said the resident, journalism student Muhammet Fatih Yavus.
Further east in Diyarbakir, cranes and rescue teams rushed people on stretchers out of a mountain of pancaked concrete floors that was once an apartment building.
On the Syrian side of the border, the quake smashed opposition-held regions that are packed with some four million people displaced from other parts of Syria by the country’s long civil war.
Many of them live in decrepit conditions with little health care, with Russian-backed Syrian forces surrounding the area and sometimes carrying out airstrikes.
Rescue workers said hospitals in the area were packed.
Raed Salah, the head of the White Helmets, the emergency organization in opposition areas, said whole neighbourhoods were collapsed in some areas.
The quake, felt as far away as Cairo, was centered about 90 kilometers (60 miles) from the Syrian border.
The region has been shaped by more than a decade of war in Syria. Millions of Syrian refugees live in Turkey. The swath of Syria affected by the quake is divided between government-held and opposition-held areas.
At least 20 aftershocks followed, some hours later during daylight, the strongest measuring 6.6, Turkish authorities said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Twitter that “search and rescue teams were immediately dispatched” to the areas hit by the quake.
“We hope that we will get through this disaster together as soon as possible and with the least damage,” he wrote.
In Turkey, people trying to leave the quake-stricken regions caused traffic jams, hampering efforts of emergency teams trying to reach the affected areas. Authorities urged residents not to take to the roads.
Mosques around the region were being opened up as a shelter for people unable to return to damaged homes amid temperatures that hovered around freezing.
In Diyarbakir, rescue teams called for silence as they tried to listen for survivors under the wreckage of an 11-story building.
Rescue workers pulled out one man, carrying him on a stretcher through a dense crowd of hundreds of people anxiously watching the rescue efforts.
A grey-haired woman wailed before being escorted away by a man, while a rescue worker wearing a white helmet tried to calm a crying girl, who was also being cuddled by two friends.
In northwest Syria, the opposition’s Syrian Civil Defense described the situation in the rebel-held region as “disastrous” adding that entire buildings have collapsed and people are trapped under the rubble.
The civil defence urged people to evacuate buildings to gather in open areas. Emergency rooms were full of injured, said Amjad Rass, president of the Syrian American Medical Society.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake was centered about 33 kilometers (20 miles) from Gaziantep. It was centered 18 kilometers (11 miles) deep.
In Damascus, buildings shook and many people went down to the streets in fear.
The quake jolted residents in Lebanon from beds, shaking buildings for about 40 seconds. Many residents of Beirut left their homes and took to the streets or drove in their cars away from buildings.
The earthquake came as the Middle East is experiencing a snowstorm that is expected to continue until Thursday.
Turkey sits on top of major fault lines and is frequently shaken by earthquakes.
Some 18,000 were killed in powerful earthquakes that hit northwest Turkey in 1999.
