Over 2,200 people, including hundreds of children, have perished in 2024 in the waters of the Mediterranean during their attempt to reach Europe, UNICEF said in a statement on Wednesday.
“The death toll and number of missing persons in the Mediterranean in 2024 have now surpassed 2,200, with nearly 1,700 lost in the central Mediterranean route alone,” said Regina De Dominicis, UNICEF’s Special Coordinator for the Refugee and Migrant Response in Europe. “This includes hundreds of children, who make up one in five of all people migrating through the Mediterranean. The majority are fleeing violent conflict and poverty,” she added.
The central Mediterranean route (from Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia to Italy and Malta) has long been the deadliest migration route in the world and the route most migrants take trying to reach Europe. According to UNHCR’s latest data for 2024, over 65,500 had crossed the central Mediterranean route on to Italy and Malta, while over 61,000 have taken the eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey to Greece. Over 16,000 had taken the western Mediterranean route, from Morocco and Algeria on to Spain.
UNICEF’s statement was released a day after a migrant boat from Libya traveling off the coast of the island of Lambedusa in Italy, sank just hours before the New Year, leaving at least 20 people missing. The seven survivors, including an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother, were taken to Lambedusa and then transferred to a hosting center in Sicily.
Dozens of migrant shipwrecks in Greece during 2024
Dozens of migrants died or went missing in separate shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea, in late December alone.
At least eight people died as a speedboat carrying migrants and asylum seekers from Turkey sank five nautical miles east of Afantou Beach off Rhodes, Greece.
The boat was spotted by port authorities as the smuggler was helping migrants disembark. The boat’s operator lost control while performing dangerous maneuvers to escape from the Coast Guard’s floating vessel, resulting in the migrants’ falling into the sea.
Eighteen migrants were rescued, and eight bodies had been recovered.
A week earlier, 35 migrants from Pakistan went missing after their boat sank near Greece’s southernmost island of Gavdos. The Pakistani Embassy in Athens said that 47 people had been rescued.
According to the embassy in Athens, three boats carrying 175 illegal migrants of various nationalities, including Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Egyptians and Sudanese crew members, capsized off the Greek coast. While all the passengers on two of the boats were rescued, only 39 out of 83 have been rescued from the third. Several teens were on board, and at least one 12-year-old Pakistani was among the passengers.
One survivor of the boat that capsized said the sea was rough and that the boat was small and not in great condition. Despite this, he said, the smugglers allowed many people to board, far surpassing the boat’s capacity -as is the case in most migrant shipwrecks.
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