Turkey earthquake live updates: at least 10 dead as strong 7.8-magnitude quake hits near Syria border

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Turkish interior minister Suleymon Soylu says 10 cities have been affected by the quake.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, the official said the cities of Gaziantep, Kahramanmara?, Hatay, Osmaniye, Adiyaman, Malatya, Sanliurfa, Adana, Diyarbakir and Kilis had all suffered damage.

Turkey’s disaster and emergency management agency said the earthquake was felt most intensely in the surrounding provinces of Kahramanmara?, but was also strongly felt in Hatay, Adana, Osmaniye, Diyarbak?r, Malatya and ?anl?urfa.

In Sanliurfa, the Turkish province east of Gaziantep where the quake’s epicentre was located, the effects were “severe and long-lasting” according to officials.

Governor Salih Ayhan urged citizens not to panic in a Twitter post early on Monday morning.

Some images are dropping from inside Turkey and Syria showing large-scale destruction:

New information from Agence France-Presse claims the death toll has increased to at least 15 people, with the number expected to climb much higher.

Locals officials said five people died in the province of Osmaniye and 10 more in Sanliurfa, which sits near Turkey’s border with Syria.

The epicentre of the quake is home to millions of Syrian refugees living in Turkey outside the city of Gaziantep.

Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees in the world, 3.5 million Syrians, according to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, which runs one of its largest operations from Gaziantep.

Many live in tents and makeshift structures.

In northwest Syria, the opposition’s Syrian civil defence 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.

Videos posted on social networks show the moment multiple apartment buildings collapsed in southern Turkey.

A BBC Turkish correspondent in Diyarbakir reports that a shopping mall in the city collapsed.

Rushdi Abualouf, a BBC producer in the Gaza Strip, said there was about 45 seconds of shaking in the house he was staying in.

Turkey is in one of the world’s most active earthquake zones.

The country sits atop the Anatolian Plate, a block of the Earth’s crust that is slowly rotating counterclockwise and shifting west with time, moving about an inch every year. Collisions with the African plate and Eurasian plate can result in frequent earthquakes.

D?zce was one of the regions hit by a 7.4-magnitude earthquake in 1999 – the worst to hit Turkey in decades. That quake killed more than 17,000 people, including about 1,000 in Istanbul.

Experts have long warned a large quake could devastate Istanbul, which has allowed widespread building without safety precautions.

A magnitude-6.8 quake hit Elaz?? in January 2020, killing more than 40 people. And in October that year, a magnitude 7.0 quake hit the Aegean Sea, killing 114 people and wounding more than 1,000.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, has tweeted his “best wishes” to citizens affected by the earthquake which was “felt in many parts of our country”.

“Our search and rescue teams were immediately dispatched to the areas affected,” he wrote.

At least 10 people have been killed in Turkey after an earthquake shook the country’s south and also northern Syria, two local Turkish officials said.

Five people died in Turkey’s Osmaniye province, its regional governor, said adding that 34 buildings had collapsed.

The mayor of Turkey’s Sanliurfa said another five people died and 16 buildings in the region collapsed.

Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s live coverage of the earthquake that hit Turkey early on Monday. I’m Samantha Lock and I’ll be bringing you all the latest developments as they unfold.

If you have just joined us, here is what we know so far:

A strong 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Turkey early on Monday and was felt across the border in Lebanon and Syria.

The quake struck at 4.17 am local time (0117 GMT). It was centred about 32km (20 miles) from Gaziantep, a major city and provincial capital in the country’s south-east, and about 26km (16 miles) from the town of Nurda??.

It was 17.7km (11 miles) deep, according to the US Geological Survey. A strong 6.7 temblor rumbled about 10 minutes later.

There were reports of tremors felt in Lebanon, Greece, Syria, Israel and Cyprus.

Videos posted on social networks showed destroyed buildings in several cities in the south-east of the country.