A 90-year-old woman has been pulled alive from the rubble of her house, 15 days after it was destroyed in the earthquake that has devastated northern Pakistan and Kashmir and killed around 79,000 people.

The woman, whose rescue was reported in The Daily Times, a Pakistani newspaper, is said to be in a stable condition at a field hospital run by Jamaat ul-Dawa, one of the extremist Islamic organisations that has provided aid and relief since the disaster.

The woman was dug from the ruins of her home yesterday, more than a week after relief workers largely gave up looking for buried survivors. It is unclear who her rescuers were.

News of her remarkable survival came as a series of aftershocks ran through the region, killing five people in Afghanistan’s eastern Zabul province.

Two aftershocks, among the heaviest of the 900 recorded since the earthquake on October 8, hit northern Pakistan and Afghanistan yesterday afternoon, bringing down mud-walled houses in villages near the border.

Meanwhile in Muzaffarabad, the ruined capital of Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, around 100 American soldiers arrived to set up an Army Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or Mash. Yesterday, General John Abizaid, head of the US Central Command, said America would send 11 more Chinook helicopters to join the rescue effort.

Today, Rashid Khalikov, chief coordinator of the UN aid effort, said supplies were beginning to find their way to earthquake survivors, although around 2,000 villages remain stranded beyond blocked roads and mudslides.

"The amounts are increasing - tents, food, non-food items," said Mr Khalikov but he added that the UN was still pleading with Nato and the international community to give "everything from excavators to gloves" ahead of a donor conference in Geneva on Wednesday.

With the first heavy snows expected in five or six weeks and 3 million people facing the Himalayan winter without food or permanent shelter, diplomatic efforts between India and Pakistan are also intensifying.

India has offered to open three relief camps along the heavily militarised border dividing Kashmir, over which it has fought two wars with Pakistan. Pakistan, meanwhile, has proposed opening five crossing points to help aid reach survivors.

Today, Islamabad said it had sent a formal proposal to New Delhi on Saturday and was awaiting a formal reply. "We have asked India to send a delegation as soon as possible," said a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman."If they send them today, we are ready to receive them."

And al-Qaeda, which habitually describes General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan as an American agent, today asked Islamic charities to do all they can for survivors of the earthquake.

In a tape broadcast on al-Jazeera, which purports to show Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, Zawahri says: "I call on all Muslims and Islamic charity organisations in particular to go to Pakistan and give a helping hand to the victims there."

Zawahri is presumed to be hiding with bin Laden somewhere along the rugged Pakistani-Afghan border.

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