At least 32 people are dead after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the southern Philippines on Monday and triggered tsunami alerts across the Pacific.

Buildings were destroyed in the port city of General Santos and the earthquake caused a landslide, which buried a village and claimed 13 lives at Sarangani.

Tsunami warnings were issued along the coasts of the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan, Papua New Guinea and Palau.

Evacuation warnings impacted neighbouring Indonesia and Malaysia.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos called on Filipinos living near the coast to “move to higher ground now. Do not wait.”

Footage shared by major media organisations shows fast-food workers fleeing a Jollibee franchise moments before the building collapses upon itself, with shocked witnesses screaming in the street.

In another clip, dozens of young students huddle together outdoors at a school in Davao, swaying as the ground shakes before an awning collapses.

The quake, the strongest to strike the country so far in 2026, was centred at sea off Mindanao, the second most populous island in the Philippine archipelago.

“Our pick-up truck suddenly jerked and I thought we had a flat tyre,” said Rod Sosmena, regional director of the Office of Civil Defence in General Santos, where the quake struck at 7.37am.

“The shaking was very strong and people dashed out of houses into the streets,” Sosmena said.

General Santos is a port city of more than 700,000 people that is a regional hub for the tuna export industry and other commerce.

According to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, the quake occurred at a depth of 33km.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said the threat of a tsunami largely passed about five hours after the quake.

Philippine officials also lifted a tsunami warning by mid-afternoon.

Six shanties on stilts were damaged in a coastal village in Zamboanga del Sur due to the quake and taller waves, officials said.

The Office of Civil Defence said earlier that at least 19 people were killed, mostly in collapsed buildings and landslides, while thousands of villagers were displaced,

Among the dead were seven people in General Santos, where a few small buildings collapsed or were severely damaged, Sosmena said.

The other deaths were caused by falling debris, a damaged mosque and a landslide in the southern provinces of Sarangani, South Cotabato and Davao Occidental and on Balut Island, Sosmena and another reginal disaster-response official, Ednar Dayanghirang, said.

Sosmena said authorities were checking reports of some students being trapped in a two-storey school that collapsed in General Santos.

Public schools had reopened nationwide on Monday after the summer holidays.

Dayanghirang said more than 100 students attending morning flag-raising ceremonies in his southern region suffered bruises and some fainted in panic.

Waves of 1m were monitored in the provinces of Sultan Kudarat and Sarangani, and a 1.4m wave was monitored at one time in the coastal area of Kiamba town in Sarangani.

The quake was also felt in Malaysia’s Sabah state on Borneo island.

An 83cm tsunami was measured by a gauge off Indonesia’s Sulawesi island, and the PTWC said 30cm waves were measured in Palau.

Waves up to 20cm were detected on the remote Japanese island of Chichijima and the central Japanese town of Kushimoto, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

The US Geological Survey reported the depth of the original quake at 55km.

Aftershocks as strong as 6.5 magnitude were recorded.

The Philippines is often hit by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of seismic faults around the ocean.

-with AAP