Migrants, shipwreck off Tunisia: 43 dead. Another 14 corpses found on the Libyan beach of Zawia

The death toll continues in the Mediterranean while NGO ships are almost all stopped in ports, the majority of them due to bureaucratic quibbles. At least 43 people drowned off the coast of Tunisia in the sinking of a migrant boat headed from Libya to Italy, while another 84 people were rescued, the Tunisian Red Crescent said according to Reuters online. The boat left Zawia, a city in northwestern Libya with migrants from Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Bangladesh on board, explains the humanitarian organization.

In Zawia, the bodies of at least 14 migrants were found, including a child and a woman. This was announced on Twitter by the spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Safa Msehli. “It is the gruesome daily reality in the Central Mediterranean,” the spokesperson commented in the post.

According to Doctors Without Borders, “In the first six months of 2021 at least 721 people lost their lives, with an increase three times higher than in the same period of 2020. We are facing an evident reality: while the humanitarian ships of the NGOs are blocked, many people continue to die in the Mediterranean ”. Among the blocked ships is Doctors Without Borders’ GeoBarents, stopped at the port of Augusta after an administrative inspection that lasted 14 hours. “It is the thirteenth time in three years that Italy has blocked humanitarian ships,” says the NGO