More than 100 people have been killed after several strong earthquakes shook Afghanistan's border region near Iran, the United Nations said on Saturday.

In addition, hundreds of houses were destroyed, the UN emergency agency OCHA said. According to unconfirmed reports, the number of deaths could be closer to 320, the statement added.

Afghanistan’s National Disaster Management Authority earlier said it feared hundreds of people could be dead after at least eight quakes shook the border region near Iran within a short period of time on Saturday morning.

Seven villages in the hard-hit border province of Herat have been completely destroyed, a spokesman for ANDMA told dpa. "Some villages had up to 1,000 or more people living in them. There were 300 houses. Only 100 people survived," the spokesman said.

According to the spokesman of the ruling Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, military and rescue organizations have been called to the affected regions. Hospitals are preparing for countless injured.

The US Geological Survey, which monitors seismic activity, put the magnitude at values between 4.6 and 6.3. The tremors occurred in the morning north-west of the Afghan border town of Herat, at a shallow depth of around ten kilometres.

The quakes were also felt in neighbouring Iran. Residents of the metropolis of Mashhad in Iran, around 300 kilometres from the earthquake zone, said that the walls of houses were shaking.

“We fled the buildings,” a resident of Afghanistan's Herat province, home to some 2 million, told dpa. “Everyone is in the open space and no one knows what happened to their houses.”

Severe earthquakes occur again and again in the region where the Arabian, Indian and Eurasian plates meet.

More than 1,000 people were killed when a devastating quake struck Afghanistan in 2022. After several decades of conflict, many houses in the country are poorly built. Earthquakes therefore often cause great damage. (dpa-Yonhap)