Video Residents cleared rubble after the 7.5-magnitude quake on Monday afternoon that killed more than 300 people in Afghanistan and Pakistan.


KABUL, Afghanistan — A day after a powerful earthquake hit northern Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said on Tuesday that more than 300 people had been killed in both countries, while warning that a complete picture of the damage in remote areas isolated by difficult terrain and an active insurgency could take days to emerge.

The National Disaster Management Authority in Pakistan said the death toll there had reached 228. In Afghanistan, officials said the 7.5-magnitude quake, centered in the Hindu Kush mountain range about 160 miles northeast of Kabul, the capital, had killed at least 76 people, but the toll appeared likely to rise.

Afghan officials said the damage stretched across 14 provinces in the country, with hundreds of people injured and more than 4,000 homes destroyed.

“Our initial assessment shows that immediate need is not for food, but for tents, blankets and warm clothes because the weather is getting cold,” Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, said in a video message. Referring to the extent of the destruction, Mr. Ghani said, “The true picture will become clear tomorrow or the day after.”


A damaged house in Mingora, Pakistan, the main town of the Swat Valley, on Tuesday, a day after a deadly earthquake hit the area.


Pakistan said that at least 1,620 people had been injured there, with 2,520 houses damaged.

Most of the damage in Pakistan was in the northwest province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where the quake razed hundreds of mud and stone houses. The national authorities sent 1,000 tents to the province and said that a kidney hospital in the Swat region had been converted into a health facility for the injured. A mobile hospital, with nine beds and a surgical team, had been sent to Dir, a remote mountainous region of the province.

Imran Khan, the opposition politician whose political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, controls Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, visited the provincial capital, Peshawar, on Tuesday to inquire about the wounded at Lady Reading Hospital. Mr. Khan said that administrative and rescue measures were underway to help people, especially in the Dir and Shangla regions, which were the worst hit.

In Islamabad, the national capital, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif held an emergency meeting with top civilian and military officials to review the rescue efforts.



A 6-year-old girl at a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Tuesday.


Some of Afghanistan’s worst-hit areas, in the east and the northeast, have been the scene of intense fighting in recent months, and the presence of the Taliban, as well as insurgents affiliated with the Islamic State, seemed certain to create difficulties for rescue and relief operations.

But the Taliban, in a statement, ordered their fighters “in the affected areas to lend their complete help to the victims and facilitate those giving charity to the needy.”

Conflicting reports were coming from the epicenter of the quake, in the remote northern Afghan province of Badakhshan, and the authorities had sent survey teams to assess the damage. The Taliban are fighting for several of the province’s isolated districts.

Officials in Badakhshan said on Tuesday that the toll there remained at 10 dead and 24 wounded. But details emerging from individual districts suggested that the number was likely to climb quickly. In the village of Rukhshan, in Warduj district, a landslide caused by the quake buried more than 300 animals.

In the eastern Afghan province of Kunar, the scene of immense landslides caused by the earthquake in combination with heavy rains, the casualty figures increased on Tuesday to 42 dead and more than 100 injured. In Takhar Province in the north, the death toll from a stampede at a girls’ school as students tried to flee the building rose to 13.

Information was slowly trickling in from the isolated province of Nuristan, which borders Pakistan. At least four people were killed, 27 wounded and nearly 300 homes destroyed or damaged, the provincial governor’s office said.

Reporting was contributed by Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan; Jawad Sukhanyar from Kabul; Najim Rahim from Kunduz, Afghanistan; Khalid Alokozay from Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan; and Nimatullah Karyab from Kunar Province, Afghanistan.