The Italian coastguard said it coordinated the rescue of about 6500 migrants in one of its busiest days of life-saving in recent years, the AFP reported.
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Approximately 6,500 migrants were rescued during 40 separate operations off the coast of Libya yesterday, the Italian Coastguard has said.
In this frame grab taken Monday, Aug. 29, 2016 from video, 5-day-old twins from Eritrea, who were born prematurely in Libya, are seen after being rescued from the Mediterranean Sea by members of two NGO’s and the Italian navy.
Three corpses were recovered as some 1,800 migrants were rescued off Libya on Wednesday, taking the total number of people saved since Sunday to almost 12,500, Italy’s coastguard said. About 2,700 people have died on the route from Libya to Italy this year, up from about 1,800 people during the same period last year.
MSF is joining other humanitarian groups calling for safe and legal routes to Europe to be opened following the deaths of more than 3,000 migrants in the Mediterranean so far this year. They were first taken by boat to the island of Lampedusa, where they were stabilized, and then airlifted to a hospital in Palermo, where the boy was admitted to the neonatal ward.
According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, more than 105,000 people have made it to Italy so far this year ― about the same number of refugees that arrived in the country during all of 2015.
Italy is however having to house ever greater numbers of would-be refugees as its neighbours to the north move to tighten their borders and make it harder for migrants to travel to their preferred destinations in northern Europe.
“The refugees, believed to be mostly from Somalia and Eritrea, were on flimsy rubber dinghies that become highly unstable in high seas”, Al Jazeera reports.
The number of people plucked from sea on Monday was much higher than the average.
A man carries his five-day-old son after been rescued from a crowded wooden boat during a rescue operation at the Mediterranean sea on Monday.
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The instability in Libya has made the country a hub for people-trafficking. A pair of newborn twin boys & their mother were among the thousands of migrants miraculously rescued from the Mediterranean during a rocky journey to Europe.
