text: Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Emily Buchanan says rescue teams face a race against time 
   
   Rescue teams in Turkey are continuing to search for people trapped under rubble after a strong earthquake hit the eastern Van region on Sunday. 
   
   Some 265 people died and 1,140 were injured in the 7.2 magnitude quake, according to Interior Minister Idris Naim Sahin. 
   
   Nearly 1,000 buildings have been destroyed in the disaster zone, with the town of Ercis the worst hit. 
   
   The death toll is expected to rise as outlying areas are reached. 
   
   Rescuers pulled out several survivors from beneath the ruins of collapsed buildings in Ercis on Monday - including one man who called for help on his mobile phone, Anatolia news agency said. 
   
   Cranes and heavy equipment are lifting slabs of concrete in Ercis and the larger city of Van as rescue crews cut through steel reinforcing bars and shift rubble in the search for more survivors. 
   
   The interior minister said he believed dozens of people were trapped in buildings in Ercis but not as many as initially feared. 
   
   At the scene Ercis occupies a beautiful site overlooking Lake Van, surrounded by snow-capped peaks. It is a beautiful setting, but today it is a scene of great sadness, shock and mourning. At one collapsed building we found four men delicately passing saucepans full of rubble that was being removed from around their 29-year-old brother Murat Saglam. He was alive, trapped on the ground floor, pinned between a car and a wall, with seven storeys collapsed on top of him. Their mother said: "None of the brothers has eaten a single thing since yesterday. We spent the night in the car here. But I won't leave until I see him. When they told me he was still alive I couldn't believe it. And I won't believe it until I see him." At the same building we found Fatih Canpolat waiting for news of his six-year-old niece. All of the rest of her family had been rescued but she had been out playing and has not been seen since the earthquake. This morning Fatih went to his brother-in-law's funeral. He died in another building. 
   
   "There could be around 100 people [in the rubble]," the Associated Press news agency quoted Mr Sahin as saying. 
   
   "It could be more or it could be less but we are not talking about thousands." 
   
   He said 169 people had died in Ercis and 96 in the Van area. 
   
   Up to 80 buildings, including a student dormitory, collapsed in Ercis, about 100km (60 miles) north of Van, while 10 fell in Van itself. 
   
   The office of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said a total of 970 buildings in the earthquake zone had collapsed. 
   
   The BBC's Daniel Sandford, in Ercis, says some 80 people are still missing at one collapsed apartment block, which once contained 20 flats. 
   
   Search crews and heavy machinery are still at work at some destroyed buildings, but at other sites the recovery effort seems to have stopped altogether, with only a few despairing and shocked relatives sitting around. 
   
   On Sunday, Mr Erdogan visited the area and said he feared for residents of outlying villages that rescue workers had not yet reached. 
   
   "Because the buildings are made of mud brick, they are more vulnerable to quakes," said Mr Erdogan. 
   
   "I must say that almost all buildings in such villages are destroyed." 
   
   Turkish seismologist Polat Gulkan told the BBC that building regulations were often ignored in Turkey. 
   
   'Screaming' 
   
   Some 2,400 rescue workers are involved in the relief effort, as are 680 medics, 12 rescue dogs and 108 ambulances - including seven air ambulances, the prime minister's office said. 
   
   Image copyright AFP In pictures: Quake zone 
   
   Tens of thousands slept outside in freezing conditions. 
   
   "We stayed outdoors all night, I could not sleep at all, my children, especially the little one, was terrified," Serpil Bilici told AP. 
   
   "I grabbed her and rushed out when the quake hit, we were all screaming." 
   
   One woman in Ercis begged rescue workers to find her friend, buried in a collapsed building. 
   
   "She's my friend and she called me to say that she's alive and she's stuck in the rubble near the stairs of the building," the woman told Reuters news agency. 
   
   Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay, who is co-ordinating the government's response in the earthquake zone, said tents were being assembled and food distributed. 
   
   Turkey's Red Crescent has set up tents in a sports stadium in Ercis. 
   
   Prime Minister Erdogan thanked other countries for their offers of help, but said Turkey could cope with the disaster on its own. 
   
   Earthquake area One of Turkey's most earthquake-prone zones 
   
   Kurdish-populated 
   
   Ercis, an eastern city of 75,000 close to the Iranian border, was the worst-hit 
   
   Van, large ancient city of one million on a lake ringed by mountains, less affected 
   
   The earthquake struck at 13:41 (10:41 GMT) at a depth of 20km (12 miles), with its epicentre 16km north-east of Van in eastern Turkey, the US Geological Survey said. 
   
   About 200 aftershocks have hit the region, it added, including one of magnitude 6.0 late on Sunday. 
   
   Turkey is particularly vulnerable to earthquakes because it sits on major geological fault lines. 
   
   Two earthquakes in 1999 with a magnitude of more than 7 killed almost 20,000 people in densely populated parts of the north-west of the country. ||||| At least 85 people have been confirmed dead after the quake struck at 1.41pm local time (11.41 BST), with the highest number of casualties coming from the city of Ercis, a city of 90,000 some 13 miles from the epicentre Tabanli and more than 36 miles north of the provincial capital city of Van. 
   
   The state hospital reported 59 people had died and more than 400 injured were being treated four hours after the quake struck. The area was also hit by a series of aftershocks. 
   
   Many patients are being treated in the garden of the hospital because it lacks sufficient capacity for all the wounded. 
   
   Based on the magnitude of the quake and the state of infrastructure in the region however, Turkey's seismology institute estimated the casualty count between 500 and 1,000. 
   
   "We estimate around 1,000 buildings are damaged and our estimate is for hundreds of lives lost. It could be 500 or 1,000," said Mustafa Erdik, the general manager of the Kandilli Observatory. 
   
   In Van city, which has a population of around 500,000, citizens fled to the streets in panic after the first shock, trying to pull trapped people from under collapsed buildings and debris. 
   
   Nefise Taylan, a management student, was in a student dormitory at Van's Yuzuncu Yil University when the quake hit. 
   
   "Everybody ran outside when the ceiling began to fall," she told The Daily Telegraph over the phone. The dormitory she was in collapsed during the quake. 
   
   "The situation is very bad. We have no electricity." 
   
   Teams from the state Search and Rescue Association's branches in surrounding provinces began to reach the area around 5pm. Search and rescue personnel have also been sent to Van from cities as far away as Istanbul and Kocaeli in the country's northwest. Last night they were scrambling to remove people from the body before nightfall, when temperatures drop close to freezing. 
   
   In anticipation of the pending numbers of homeless, more than 1,000 tents, and 500 food packages have been sent to Van by Turkish Red Crescent, the country's largest humanitarian organisation. 
   
   Offers of aid from countries including the United States, Britain, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Switzerland and Greece began pouring in hours after the earthquake. Israel, whose relationship with Turkey has deteriorated in the last year, also said they were prepared to offer the Turkish government "any aid they might need". 
   
   Ercis's mayor, Zulfikar Arapoglu, also issued an urgent call for aid on NTV Television. 
   
   "There are so many dead. Several buildings have collapsed, there is too much destruction," he said. "We need urgent aid. We need medics." 
   
   In the district of Celebibag, near Ercis, Mayor Veysel Keser said that countless people were still trapped under rubble. 
   
   "We can hear the screams of people who are under the rubble, in agony," he said. "Student dormitories, hotels and gas stations have collapsed." 
   
   The airport at Van was also damaged, diverting planes to nearby cities and forcing relief teams to travel by road. 
   
   Ercis also experienced the worst infrastructure damage, with 25 to 30 buildings collapsing in the city alone, according to Besir Atalay, the deputy prime minister. 
   
   Sunday's earthquake had a relatively shallow depth of 12.2 miles, according to the US Geological Survey, which is likely to increase the damage wrought. 
   
   Van province lies several hundred miles east of the East Anatolian fault, one of Turkey's most seismically active regions. 
   
   Although the earthquake reportedly affected the surrounding provinces of Diyarbakir and Erzurum, residents in the capital cities of those provinces told The Daily Telegraph they felt nothing when it occurred. 
   
   The earthquake was the largest to strike Turkey since 1999 when two earthquakes with a magnitude of more than 7 hit northwest Turkey, killing 18,000.
target: – Though the official death toll in the wake of southeast Turkey's earthquake has hit about 270, officials fear that as many as 1,000 people may have been killed in the 7.2 shaker that toppled scores of buildings yesterday. "We estimate some 1,000 buildings are damaged and our estimate is for hundreds of lives lost. It could be 500 or 1,000," said a spokesman for a Turkish seismology institute, reports the Telegraph. Van, a city of some 500,000, was hit particularly hard; rescuers and neighbors are battling exhaustion to dig out trapped residents, reports the BBC. More than 1,000 tents and hundreds of emergency food packages have been sent to the area by the Turkish Red Crescent humanitarian organization, and offers of aid are pouring in from around the world. "There are so many dead," said the mayor of Ercis, another devastated town. "Several buildings have collapsed, there is too much destruction. We need urgent aid. We need medics. We can hear the screams of people who are under the rubble, in agony."