UN agency reports ‘unprecedented’ death toll on Mediterranean migration route

Politico Europe · Feb 26, 2026 · Collected from RSS

Full Article

News Politics Real number likely higher as “hundreds more missing at sea,” U.N.’s migration agency says. At least 2,185 people died or disappeared while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea last year. | Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP via Getty Images February 26, 2026 5:52 pm CET The start of this year has been the deadliest on record for migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea, according to a report from the International Organization for Migration. At least 606 people died in the Mediterranean Sea between Jan. 1 and Feb. 24, an “unprecedented number” for the first months of a year, said the report, published Thursday. The real number may be considerably higher, as there are reports of “hundreds more missing at sea” that have yet to be verified, with 23 bodies having already washed up on Italian and Libyan coasts over the past two weeks, the U.N. agency said. The persistently high death toll shows the need for safe, regular routes and protection measures amid a “growing reach of trafficking and migrant smuggling networks” that exploit desperate people, the agency said. “When safe pathways are out of reach, people are forced into dangerous journeys and into the hands of smugglers and traffickers,” IOM Director General Amy Pope said in a statement, adding migrant deaths are “not inevitable” and are “a global failure we cannot accept as normal.” The EU has been taking steps to reduce migration to the continent, including plans to remove failed asylum seekers faster and measures that allow countries to cut deals to set up migration processing hubs in other nations, regardless of whether the people being moved there have a connection with those countries. The EU’s priority now is “about bringing illegal arrivals to a minimum and keeping those numbers there,” Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner said when presenting the bloc’s migration strategy in January. That’s “not as an end in itself,” he said, but reduces pressure on EU countries, prevents abuse, reinforces people’s trust in the EU, and helps save lives. “Any smuggling trip prevented is potentially a life which we save.” As a next step, the EU “must address migration along the whole route,” including by ensuring protection for people in need “closer to the point of departure,” Brunner said. The spike in fatalities shows the continued dangers of the Mediterranean migration route, despite registered arrivals in Italy dropping sharply — from 6,358 in the first two months of 2025 to 2,465 in the same period this year. At least 2,185 people died or disappeared while attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea last year — but that’s an underestimate, the agency said, as evidenced by the at least 270 human remains washed ashore that couldn’t be linked to known shipwrecks. “The increasing restriction of search and rescue information on sea routes to Europe has meant that an exceptionally high number of cases could not be verified,” the agency said. Across the world, at least 7,667 people died or went missing on migratory routes in 2025, according to the IOM.