Less than two months after one of the deadliest shipwrecks in decades, a new shipwreck off the coast of Italy this past week has left 41 migrants feared dead.
Four survivors of the shipwreck told Italian authorities that the boat they were on was originally carrying 45 people before it capsized during the journey, according to ANSA, an Italian news service. The boat reportedly set off on August 3 from Sfax, a city on the Tunisian coast, which has become one of the main departure points for migrants seeking to reach Europe. The surviving passengers were from Ivory Coast and Guinea, according to aid officials.
The tragic incident adds to hundreds of migrant deaths via shipwreck in the last year — as the number of people seeking asylum in Europe after being forced to flee conflict and poverty in their home countries grows. Off the coast of Greece in June, as many as 700 migrants may have died at sea.
About 121,000 people have arrived by sea to Europe as of August 6, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM). This is high for recent years — though all crossings into Europe declined during the Covid-19 pandemic — but remains below the more than 1 million refugees who attempted to reach Europe by sea in 2015.
Fatalities and missing persons in the Mediterranean Sea — a route that’s typically used to go from North Africa to Europe — have nearly doubled compared to last year, climbing higher than 1,800 people, according to IOM. (More than 2,300 migrants in total have died or gone missing on the way to Europe so far in 2023; for all of 2016, more than 5,000 people perished or disappeared.) The recent uptick is due to a host of factors, including a surge in migrants from Libya and Tunisia to Italy; traffickers putting people on unstable iron vessels; and insufficient resources dedicated to rescue efforts by European governments.
Ultimately, many migrants are choosing this risky avenue because of the limited legal…
Read the full article here