The Jordan Rift Valley earthquake destroys multiple cities across the Levant, triggers a tsunami and kills many.

An earthquake struck the Jordan Rift Valley on December 5, AD 1033 and caused extreme devastation in the Levant region. It was part of a sequence of four strong earthquakes in the region between 1033 and 1035. Scholars have estimated the moment magnitude to be greater than 7.0 M_w  and evaluated the Modified Mercalli intensity to X (Extreme). It triggered a tsunami along the Mediterranean coast, causing damage and fatalities. At least 70,000 people were killed in the disaster.

The Levant is a subregion of West Asia that borders the Eastern Mediterranean sea to the west and forms the core of the Middle East. In its narrowest sense, which is in use today in archaeology and other cultural contexts, it is equivalent to Cyprus and a stretch of land bordering the Mediterranean Sea in Western Asia that is, the historical region of Syria, which includes present-day Syria, as well as Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and the southern part of Cilicia. Its overwhelming characteristic is that it represents the land bridge between Africa and Eurasia. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the Eastern Mediterranean with its islands; that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece in Southern Europe to Egypt and Cyrenaica in Northern Africa.

A tsunami is a series of waves in a water body caused by the displacement of a large volume of water, generally in an ocean or a large lake. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and underwater explosions above or below water all have the potential to generate a tsunami. Unlike normal ocean waves, which are generated by wind, or tides, which are in turn generated by the gravitational pull of the Moon and the Sun, a tsunami is generated by the displacement of water from a large event.