A very powerful earthquake measuring magnitude 7.8 struck southern Turkey during the night: at least eleven thousand people have been killed and tens of thousands injured. According to the Turkish news agency Anadolu, at least ten Turkish provinces were affected by the quake, in particular the city of Gaziantep, located just 30 kilometres from the epicentre and home to over two million inhabitants, as well as the areas of Sanliurfa, Diyarbakir, Malatya and Adana. The extremely violent tremor struck at 4:16 local time and was also felt across several regions of Syria and Lebanon. The Syrian civil defence declared a state of emergency in the north-east of the country and issued an appeal to international humanitarian organisations to intervene with aid as quickly as possible. In Italy, a tsunami warning had been immediately issued on the advice of the Istituto nazionale di geologia e vulcanologia, and rail services in the south of the country had been suspended as a precaution. The wave caused by the seismic shift struck the Sicilian coast between 6:30 and 6:40 between Syracuse, Catania, Messina and then the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Strait of Sicily, without causing any repercussions. Ferrovie dello Stato also announced that "rail services in Sicily, Calabria and Puglia have also regularly resumed."

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