Twelve confirmed deaths following Magnitude 5.8 Earthquake in Afghanistan.

The United States Geological Survey recorded a Magnitude 5.8 Earthquake at a depth of 186.4 km, roughly 35 km to the south of the town of Jurm in Badakhshan Province, northern Afghanistan, slightly after 8.40 pm local time (slightly after 4.10 pm GMT on Friday 3 April 2026. The Earthquake was felt across Afghanistan, as well as southern Tajikistan, northern Pakistan, and India as far as New Delhi. 

Twelve people have been confirmed to have been killed by the event, eight of them members of the same family who died when their house collapsed in the Gosfand Dara area of Kabul province, according to the Afghan Red Crescent Society. The only member of the family reported to have survived the collapse was a two-year-old boy, who is said to have been badly injured. The remaining four people killed were in separate incidents to the east of Kabul. Another three people have been reported to have been injured, with five houses destroyed and 33 damaged, affecting 40 families across  Kabul, Panjshir, Logar, Nangarhar, Laghman and Nuristan provinces. This pattern of causing little damage close to the epicentre but more harm in an area a considerable distance from the epicentre is typical of deep Earthquakes, the energy of which is dispersed over a wide distance before reaching the surface.

The approximate location of the 3 April 2026 Afghanistan Earthquake. USGS.

The boundary between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates runs close to northern Afghanistan. The Indian Plate is moving northward relative to the Eurasian Plate, causing folding and uplift along this boundary, which has led to the formation of the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan, the Himalayas and the other mountain ranges of Central Asia., and which makes the nations in this boundary zone prone to Earthquakes.

Plate boundaries and movements beneath southern Pakistan, Iran and the Arabian Sea. University of Southampton.

While the occurrence of Earthquakes in Afghanistan is inevitable, the situation is made far worse by the country's weak infrastructure, with few buildings having any form of Earthquake-proofing. Homes are typically made from concrete and brick in urban areas, and wood and mud brick in rural areas, with little in the way of building regulations, and neither material help nor advice available to people who might want to invest in improving the resilience of their properties. Previous natural disasters in Afghanistan have seen many people displaced internally by the loss of both homes and infrastructure as well as shortages of drinkable water, and local hospitals and medical centres struggling to cope due to shortages of medicines, equipment, and staff (in particular female staff, most of whom have been forced to leave their occupations due to the restrictive laws of the Taliban regime).

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