Rome — Bodies washed ashore day after day. Phone calls from relatives are not being answered. Migrants’ tents were abandoned overnight.
Migrants trying to reach Europe are disappearing in so-called “invisible shipwrecks” but governments responsible for search and rescue are withholding information about what they know.
The start of 2026 is the deadliest start to any year for people trying to cross the Mediterranean – an unprecedented 682 confirmed as of March 16 – according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. But the actual death toll is almost certainly higher.
Human rights groups have increasingly struggled to scrutinize the tolls as Italy, Tunisia and Malta quietly block information on migrant rescues and shipwrecks on the world’s deadliest migration route. News only makes headlines, as a lack of transparency prevents journalists from confirming reports.
“It’s a strategy of silence,” said Matteo Villa, a researcher focusing on migration and data at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies think tank.
Refugees in Libya and other human rights groups have been sounding the alarm since late January, when more than 1,000 people were reported missing after Hurricane Harry hit the region. But the authorities have not confirmed, denied or corrected those reports.
In the weeks following the storm, more than 20 decomposing bodies washed ashore in Italy and Libya while other human remains were spotted floating in the middle of the sea.
For the families of the missing migrants, their future is grim.
“Europe needs to know that these people drowned at sea have family members, dreams, passions,” Josephus Thomas, a migrant from Sierra Leone and a community leader in the Tunisian coastal town of El Amra, told the AP.
The UN’s migration agency is unable to verify cases of so-called “invisible shipwrecks” due to a lack of information.
Last year, at least 1,500 people were reported missing whose fate IOM could not confirm, said Julia Black, who heads the organization’s Missing Migrants Project. The problem will continue in 2026.
“We started a new secondary data set called unverifiable cases because it turned out to be too many,” Block said. For this year, he already has more than 400 missing that he could not verify.
Many humanitarian organizations that previously filled some information gaps are no longer able to do so because of a global wave of funding cuts and government-imposed restrictions across the region.
“We’ve seen the restriction of access to humanitarian actors, which is not right. And now we’re also seeing the restriction of information,” Black said.
The Associated Press has repeatedly asked officials in Tunisia, Italy and Malta why they are not sharing information related to the protection of migrants at sea and what their policies are. No one responded.
Over the years, Mediterranean authorities have gradually reduced information on migrants. But their silence became even more apparent in late January after Hurricane Harry unleashed heavy rain, 100 kph (62 mph) winds and 9-meter-high (30-foot) waves.
Hundreds of people have disappeared from the Tunisian coastal region of Sfax, according to information collected by a Libyan refugee group from Tunisian migrants and their relatives abroad.
The group acknowledged that it was difficult to say precisely because “no central system records departures, losses or recoveries”, but it warned that the death toll could be much higher.
“We’re seeing boats that never count how many children are inside,” Refugees in Libya founder David Yambio told the AP.
AP sent five email requests to the Italian coast guard seeking information about the missing boats and search efforts and received no response. An official who answered the phone said the Coast Guard had “no further verified and confirmed information regarding the circumstances.” The AP also filed a Freedom of Information request, which is pending.
Coast Guard Jan. On the 24th, vessels sailing between the Italian island of Lampedusa and Tunisia declined to comment on an alert asking them to keep an eye on eight small boats in distress carrying about 380 people. The warning was made public by Italian journalist Sergio Scandura.
Only one of the boats that went missing during Hurricane Harry was reported to have survived. He was floating in the water when a merchant ship rescued him on January 22. He told the crew that he was traveling with 50 other people, some of whose bodies can be seen in the water in the video of the rescue. Thanks to their testimony, their deaths were included in the IOM’s tally.
According to the captain, the survivors were evacuated to Malta. The Maltese armed forces did not respond to multiple requests about their involvement, nor did they respond to reports that they had seized persons and bodies.
Tunisia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Tunisian National Guard did not respond to multiple requests for information by email and phone.
Frontex, the European Union agency that helps countries with border surveillance, told the AP that it spotted eight boats carrying about 160 migrants between January 14 and 24 when the storm hit. It said six boats had been rescued by Italian authorities, but the fate of the remaining two was unknown.
On February 8, migrants prayed and cried at a memorial service in olive groves near Sfax, thinking their loved ones could not be alive after so many days without news.
“Here we are all in deep shock, in deep suffering,” said Tunisian immigrant Dr. Relatives of Ibrahim Fofana have been missing since late January, refugees in Libya said in a video shared. He appealed to the authorities to identify the bodies washed ashore in Italy.
Until mid-2024, Tunisian officials regularly shared the number of migrants they intercepted at sea, eager to show their European partners compliance with a 2023 agreement to curb migration in exchange for financial aid. But the treaty was followed by a brutal crackdown on immigrants in the land, resulting in thousands of people being imprisoned or thrown into the desert.
Non-governmental organizations such as the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, known by the French acronym FTDES, which used to compile and share reports on migrant detentions, were also caught up in the crackdown.
In June 2024, Tunisia’s Interior Ministry stopped releasing any information about migrants, citing security reasons, said Romdhane Ben Amor, a spokesperson for FTDES. But in his view, the motives were political. He said the numbers do not match the narrative that Tunisia is not Europe’s border guard.
The erosion of Italy’s migrant rescue data is older than Tunisia’s. The Italian Coast Guard used to provide detailed monthly data on rescued migrants. Villa said the monthly reports will be quarterly before stopping entirely in 2020. In 2022, earlier reports were also removed from the Coast Guard’s website.
This year, Italian coastguards have not shared any migration-related press releases despite nearly 5,000 migrants disembarking on Italian coasts, according to figures from Italy’s interior ministry.
“This is clearly a political ploy to suppress as much information as possible from the public,” Villa said.
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Brito reports from Barcelona, Spain. Trisha Thomas contributed to this report from Rome.
(tags to translate)Politics(T)Immigration(T)World News(T)General News(T)Article(T)131138758
