One resident in Nurgal district, one of the worst-affected areas in Kunar, said almost the entire village had collapsed.

“Children are under the rubble. The elderly are under the rubble. Young people are under the rubble,” said the villager, who did not give his name.

“We need help here,” he pleaded. “We need people to come here and join us. Let us pull out the people who are buried. There is no one who can come and remove dead bodies from under the rubble.”

The Telegraph reported that hospitals in Kunar were overwhelmed, with patients treated in corridors and courtyards. “Vans filled with bodies are arriving by the minute,” Dr Shahidullah Aziz said. “The morgue is already full.”

Many areas had not been able to report casualty figures, health ministry spokesperson Sharafat Zaman said, and “the numbers were expected to change” as death and injuries were reported.

Eastern Afghanistan is mountainous, with remote areas. The quake, which was just 8 kilometres deep, has worsened communications. Shallower quakes tend to cause more damage.

One survivor described seeing homes collapse before his eyes and people screaming for help.

Sadiqullah, who lives in the Maza Dara area of Nurgal, said he was woken by a deep boom that sounded like a big storm approaching. Like many Afghans, he uses only one name.

He ran to where his children were sleeping and rescued three of them. He was about to return to grab the rest of his family when the room fell on top of him.

“I was half-buried and unable to get out,” he told The Associated Press by phone from Nangarhar Hospital. “My wife and two sons are dead, and my father is injured and in hospital with me. We were trapped for three to four hours until people from other areas arrived and pulled me out.”

It felt like the whole mountain was shaking, he said.

Military rescue teams fanned out across the two provinces, the defence ministry said in a statement, adding that 40 flights had carried out 420 wounded and dead.

Mujahid said “all available resources will be utilised to save lives”.

The earthquake was Afghanistan’s deadliest since June 2022, when tremors of magnitude 6.1 killed at least 1000 people.

The disaster will further stretch the resources of the South Asian nation already grappling with humanitarian crises, from a sharp drop in aid to a huge pushback of its citizens from neighbouring countries.

“So far, no foreign governments have reached out to provide support for rescue or relief work,” a foreign office spokesperson said.

Nearby Jalalabad is a key border crossing between Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan. Although it has a population of about 300,000, according to the municipality, its metropolitan area is thought to be far larger.

Afghanistan is prone to deadly earthquakes, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountain range, where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet.

A series of earthquakes in its west killed more than 1000 people last year, underscoring the vulnerability of one of the world’s poorest countries to natural disasters.