An earthquake measuring 7.9 hit Turkey shortly after 2 am Italian time. As the hours go by, a particularly dramatic picture of the situation is emerging. The deaths reported by the authorities rise to 76, 440 the injured, but the toll remains pending and seems destined to worsen given that dozens of buildings have collapsed in various areas of the country.
The Ministry of the Interior has defined the rescue of those who have remained under the rubble as a “priority” and has invited the population not to use cell phones in order not to cause the collapse of communications. But it is not only Turkey that is suffering in these hours: the situation in north-western Syria is also described as disastrous, where local sources speak of collapsed buildings and people buried under the rubble. State media, citing the Ministry of Health, updated the figure to 99 dead. In Lebanon the earth shook for 40 seconds, people fled to the streets in terror.
According to data from the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (Ingv) and the US geological monitoring service Usgs, the earthquake in Turkey had its hypocenter about 25 km deep and its epicenter in the province of Gaziantep. Several aftershocks followed, the first, with the strongest, 11 minutes later, measuring 6.7. According to the BBC, a shopping center collapsed in Dyarbakir, in the southeast of the country. In Italy, the civil protection has issued a tsunami warning for the eastern coasts of Calabria, Puglia and Sicily.