The search for survivors and treat the wounded continues today, after a deadly earthquake struck Afghanistan's eastern provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar.

The region's mountainous terrain and narrow roads - some of which have been blocked by landslides - have made it difficult for rescuers and relief items to reach the quake-hit sites.

Helicopters have been used instead to airlift injured residents, who are then brought to hospitals.

Stories from survivors are now emerging: some of them have recently been deported from Pakistan, local media reported. Meanwhile, there are fears that women may not get timely aid, due to the region's strong conservatism.

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Image source, Getty Images

It's 7:30 in London and 11:00 in Afghanistan where the search for survivors of a powerful earthquake is on its second day. If you're just joining us, here's what you need to know:

• At least 800 people have died across Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, and 1,800 people were injured by Sunday's magnitude 6.0 earthquake
• Helicopter teams are bringing the injured to hospitals from remote villages, the BBC's Yogita Limaye reports from Jalalabad, near the earthquake's epicentre

• Rescue efforts are complicated by mountainous terrain. The affected villages are difficult to get to on a regular day, but now many of the roads connecting them have been blocked by debris

• Foreign governments and international aid groups have sent relief supplies to quake-hit zones. We're expecting more to arrive in the coming hours and days

• Among those affected by the disaster, of particular concern are women and girls: the quake-hit region is very conservative and there are fears that women may have their treatment delayed for cultural reasons

Yogita Limaye
reporting from Jalalabad, Afghanistan

The injured are being brought to the only major hospital in the city which was already overstretched even before the disaster.

We’ve been to this hospital last year and it was completely overwhelmed trying to treat more than 1,000 patients every day. It’s now been pushed into chaos.

We met Mir Zaman who brought in his 3-year-old son Naseebullah. Naseebullah's twin sister and younger brother died in the earthquake.

Mir Zaman says he pulled his dead children out of the rubble himself.

"It was dark. There was no light. Someone lent me a lamp, and then I used a shovel and pick axe to dig them out. There was no one to help because everyone was affected. So many people died in my village. Some are still buried. Whole families have died.”

Two-and-a-half-year-old Maiwand has head injuries and has suffered blood loss. His uncle Khawat Gul was turned away from clinic to clinic before he came here.

"You can see his situation. It’s so tragic. The earthquake was deadly. I want the doctors to treat him, to cure him,” Gul says.

This earthquake has hit Afghanistan when it’s already reeling under severe drought and what the UN calls an unprecedented crisis of hunger.

It has also experienced massive aid cuts especially from the US this year which is further reducing the aid that many of these people could have got. This disaster couldn’t have come at a worse time for Afghanistan.

Rescue operations on Monday focused on four village in Kunar, and will now aim to reach more remote locations, Ehsanullah Ehsan, the province's disaster management chief, has told Reuters news agency.

"We cannot accurately predict how many bodies might still be trapped under the rubble," he said. "Our effort is to complete these operations as soon as possible and to begin distributing aid to the affected families."

The difficult drive to the mountainous villages is hampering relief efforts. Heavy machines have been deployed to clear the roads, he said.

As we've been reporting, helicopters have resumed flights to reach injured people in remote mountain villages.

Here are photos from the first flights yesterday.

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

Afghanistan is very prone to earthquakes because it is located on top of a number of fault lines where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet.

In 2023, more than 1,400 people died after a series of 6.3-magnitude earthquakes hit western Afghanistan, near the city of Herat.

The year before that, a 5.9-magnitude earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan, killing at least 1,000 people and injuring another 3,000.

While that earthquake had been of moderate magnitude, it was so destructive because it was shallow - happening at just 10km (6 miles) under the earth's surface.

The depth of the quake on Sunday was even shallower, at 8km (5 miles). Hundreds are feared dead or wounded.

Those living in remote villages are particularly vulnerable because the houses there, built with timber, mud brick, or weak concrete, tend not to be earthquake resistant.

A lot of damage from earthquakes in Afghanistan's mountains also comes from the landslides they cause, which make it difficult for rescue workers to reach victims.

Yogita Limaye
in Jalalabad, Afghanistan

Helicopter operations have restarted from Jalalabad in a bid to reach villages at the epicentre of the earthquake.

Their task: To bring the injured back to the regional hospital in this eastern Afghan city.

Locals say people are still trapped under the rubble. In Kunar’s mountainous terrain, road access to the affected areas is challenging at the best of times.

It will take days for the full scale of the disaster to be assessed.

The Taliban government has appealed for international help. The UN has released emergency funds, while the UK has pledged £1m ($1.3m) in aid, stressing that the money will not go into the Taliban’s hands. India has sent food and relief material including tents. China has also pledged support.

AI-generated images of earthquake circulating onlinepublished at 05:25 British Summer Time

05:25 BST

As BBC Verify continues to search for and authenticate footage and pictures from the Afghanistan earthquake we’ve also found that two widely shared images allegedly showing destroyed buildings are AI-generated.

Our suspicions were first raised by the lighting in the images, which didn’t look quite right.

We put both of them through SynthID, Google's own AI fake detector, which suggested they had been "made with Google AI".

A reverse image search pulled up hundreds of results across all major social media platforms.

They’ve also been picked up and shared by several news outlets globally.

One post on X from a former member of Afghanistan’s parliament claimed one of the fake images showed “heartbreaking scenes” from Kunar province.

While it is difficult to identify who first posted the image, we can see some accounts began sharing it late last night on X and TikTok.

Image source, X/S. Jaishankar

India has delivered 1,000 family tents to Kabul, its foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar wrote in a post on X on Monday, after speaking to his Taliban counterpart Amir Khan Muttaqi.

The Indian mission is also helping to move 15 tonnes of food from Kabul to Kunar province, which has been badly hit by the earthquake, he said, adding that India would send more relief items.

"Wish early recovery of those injured. India stands by Afghanistan at this difficult time," he said.

Image source, Afghanistan Cricket Board

Ahead of its game against the UAE, Afghanistan's national cricket team observed a minute of silence and recited verses from the Quran in tribute to the victims of the earthquake. The players sported black armbands.

The team has pledged its match fees from last night's game, as well as additional donations, to people affected by the earthquake. They won the game by 38 runs.

The mountainous terrain in eastern Kabul, where the earthquake struck, has posed serious challenges to rescue and relief efforts.

The road to the worst affected villages have been cut off because of landslides, as the BBC's South Asia and Afghanistan correspondent Yogita Limaye reports.

The earthquake's epicentre was 27km (17 miles) east of Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province and Afghanistan's fifth-largest city.

But the villages in neighbouring Kunar province were hit the hardest. In Nurgal district, entire villages were destroyed and roads were blocked.

With the earthquake's shallow depth of 8km (5 miles), tremors were also felt 140km (87 miles) away in the capital Kabul.

Earthquakes are common in Afghanistan, which sits on major fault lines where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet.

Some families affected by the earthquake had just recently been deported from Pakistan, according to local news outlet Tolo News.

Mohammad Aslam, who lives in Ghaziabad village in Kunar, said he'd lost five members of his family.

"The whole house collapsed on us. We lost five people - my father, two of my uncle’s sons, and two of my cousins’ children," he told Tolo News, external.

It's unclear what circumstances Aslam was in before being deported by Pakistan.

The quake-hit area of Kunar, which was hit by an earthquake late on Sunday, sits near Afghanistan's border with Pakistan.

According to the UN, Pakistan had earlier this year accelerated its drive to expel undocument Afghans. In March, NGO Human Rights Watch said, external Pakistani authorities had been "coercing" Afghan refugees to return to Afghanistan - despite the risk of persecution by the Taliban and dire economic conditions.

More than 3.5 million Afghans have been living in Pakistan, according to the UN's refugee agency. Pakistan has taken in Afghans through decades of war, but the government says the high number of refugees now poses risks to national security and causes pressure on public services.

Image source, Getty Images

There are fears that women in the quake-hit province of Kunar - which is very conservative - may have their treatment delayed for cultural reasons. They might have chosen to stay or wait for daylight to be taken to hospital by their families, BBC Afghan Service editor Shoaib Sharifi says.

A freelance reporter told the BBC Afghan Service earlier that while some women had been brought to Jalalabad’s main hospital, there were far more men in the hospital than women.

"Women and girls are bearing the brunt of the crisis, as it happens always," Deepmala Mahla from the humanitarian organisation CARE told the BBC in a TV interview.

"We need women humanitarian aid workers to be able to access, talk to and distribute relief items to women and girls."

In Afghanistan, strict Taliban regulations and deeply-rooted patriarchal traditions make it nearly impossible for women to live independently. Women are legally and socially required to have a male guardian for travel, work, or even accessing many services, and most economic opportunities are closed to them.

A magnitude 6.0 earthquake hit Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province overnight, with its epicentre striking just 27km (17 miles) away from the city of Jalalabad, the nation's fifth-largest.

Shaking was also felt in Afghanistan's capital Kabul and in neighbouring Pakistan.

If you're just joining us, here's a quick update of where things stand:

• The quake has killed at least 800 people across the Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, leaving 1,800 people injured
• Some villages have been completely destroyed, the Taliban government says

• Details are still emerging and the numbers of people killed or injured could rise significantly
• The remoteness of the areas hit by the quake make the search and rescue even harder, our South Asia and Afghanistan correspondent Yogita Limaye reports; she says masses of people are feared trapped under rubble

In the mountainous Kunar province, the search for survivors continues while residents seek safety and treatment after the disaster. Here are some of the images we're getting from the scene.

Image source, EPA/Shutterstock

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

A doctor who works at the provincial hospital in Asadabad in Kunar, told the BBC's Newshour that his small hospital had treated more than 200 people today. They only have 150 beds.

The Red Cross is offering assistance, "but we need more help", he said.

While some countries have pledged to provide support to disaster relief efforts, "so far we've received nothing", he said.

"The international community should set aside any differences it has with the Taliban and help Afghans and send aid," the doctor said.

"Thousands have lost their homes. We need tents. We need medicine".

Amy Martin, who leads the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Afghanistan, had earlier told the BBC that housing, shelter, blankets are likely to be most needed in the quake-hit areas.

They are preparing hot meals and high-energy biscuits and are working to "reach as many people as possible", she said in a TV interview hours ago.

However, the "severe financial cuts" to humanitarian assistance recently have "had an impact" in Afghanistan, Ms Martin said. In the quake-hit region, for example, more than 80 health clinics have closed, cutting off easy healthcare access to more than 500,000 people, she said.

• For context: A number of aid agencies stopped their work in Afghanistan after the Taliban swept back to power in 2021

On co-operating with the Taliban government in the disaster response, Ms Martin said that local authorities were leading the initial search and rescue and there was "no obstruction and no blockages for the moment".

She added that they planned to meet with Taliban officials in Kabul "to assess where we stand as a community in support of the Afghan people".

Image source, Reuters

As we mentioned earlier, a number of nations - including China, India, the UK and Switzerland - have pledged donations of aid.

The UK's £1m emergency funding "will help our partners to deliver critical healthcare and emergency supplies to the most hard-hit", Foreign Secretary David Lammy said.

The UK funds will be split equally between the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the International Red Cross (IFRC) to deliver critical healthcare and emergency supplies to Afghans in the most affected regions.

India's Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said it had delivered 1,000 tents to Kabul and was moving 15 tonnes of food to Kunar, with more relief material to be sent from India today.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said aninitial $5m had been released from the UN's global emergency response fund.

Afghanistan's rescue efforts have resumed this morning, as at least 800 people have been killed in one of the country's worst earthquakes on Sunday.

There are fears the death toll will rise significantly as the worst-hit area is remote and mountainous, making rescue operations difficult. Most of the deaths occurred in the mountainous Kunar province, which was closest to the epicentre of the 6.0 magnitude when it struck on Sunday night.

Britain set out a £1m ($1.35m) emergency funding support, with the Foreign Office stressing it would channel it through its partners in order to ensure that the aid does not go to the Taliban administration ruling the South Asian country.

A number of other nations - including China, India and Switzerland - have pledged donations of aid. The UN has released $5m (£3.7m) from its global emergency response fund.

Stay with us as we bring you the latest information from the affected areas.