About 6,500 refugees were on Monday rescued off the coast of Libya, the Italian coast guard said, in one of its busiest days of life-saving in recent years.
Dramatic images of one operation showed about 700 refugees crammed onto a fishing boat, with some of them jumping off the vessel in life jackets and swimming towards rescuers.
A five-day-old baby was among those rescued along with other infants and was airlifted to an Italian hospital, according to Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which took part in operations.
Photo: AP
“The command center coordinated 40 rescue operations” that included vessels from Italy, humanitarian organizations as well as the EU’s border agency Frontex, saving 6,500 refugees, the coast guard wrote on Twitter.
“We’ve been particularly busy today,” a spokesman for the Italian coast guard said.
On Sunday, more than 1,100 refugees were rescued in the same area.
The total number of arrivals in Italy this year stands at 112,500, according to the UN’s refugee agency and the coast guard, slightly below the 116,000 recorded by the same point last year.
Almost all of the refugees originate from West Africa and the Horn of Africa, often departing from Libya en masse when the sea is calm and a southern wind can push boats up into international waters.
Such days often come one after another, leading to large numbers of boats over a short period. More than 13,000 people were rescued in under a week at the end of May, and 8,300 more at the start of this month.
The Italian coast guard predicted that weather conditions would encourage the departure of further refugees boats yesterday.
The vessels are often flimsy and overcrowded, while some of the refugees set off in such poor health that even if the crossing is calm they cannot survive a day at sea.
There are around a dozen vessels run by humanitarian groups that patrol the waters off the Libyan coast, but tensions in the zone have flared recently as rival factions battle to control refugee trafficking.
This month, an MSF ship taking part in refugee rescue operations came under attack from armed men who shot at the vessel before briefly climbing aboard, the medical charity said.
Nobody was hurt in the incident that took place on Aug. 17, it said.
More than 3,000 refugees have died at sea while trying to reach either Greece or Italy since the start of this year, an increase of about 50 percent compared with the same period last year.
About 204,000 others crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Europe in the first six months of this year, the UN refugee agency said, as the continent battles its worst refugee crisis since World War II.
Last year, more than 1 million refugees made the journey to Europe, with the majority fleeing war in Syria and the Middle East.
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