According to the IOM, nearly all this year’s arrivals by sea were initially registered in Italy or Greece, with the numbers roughly equal. A record of some 219,000 people crossed the Mediterranean in 2014 and more than 120,000 have already made the perilous sea journey this year.
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Only a month ago IOM announced that the number of migrants hit 100,000.
“On average, 1,000 arrive every day on the Greek islands”, UNHCR spokesman William Spindler told reporters in Geneva, adding that majority were fleeing from Syria.
“The arrival in Europe of 150,000 migrants is a substantial number but can not be described as an invasion considering that Europe is home to over 500 million people and Lebanon, a country of 4 million people, is hosting 1.5 million Syrian refugees and Turkey is hosting about 2 million”, Federico Soda, director of the IOM’s Mediterranean office, said in a statement.
On the end of June, the leaders of the EU countries agreed to help the two EU Mediterranean countries which are suffering the most from the European migration crisis, and promised to take in 40,000 migrants.
Almost all of the migrants and refugees who arrive in Greece, where the reception capacity is “completely overwhelmed”, move on, trying to reach western and northern Europe by passing through the western Balkans region.
The bodies were recovered from a small boat that was sinking when it was spotted by the coastguard during one of the operations.
“We would expect the EU to activate its emergency response because Greece is part of the European Union”.
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On the occasion of the World Refugee Day, UN High Commissioner for Refugee António Guterres had said: “Fifteen years into a millennium that many of us hoped would see an end to war, a spreading global violence has come to threaten the very foundations of our worldwide system…World stability is falling apart leaving a wake of displacement on an unprecedented scale. It is happening on the doorstep of Europe”, Spindler said, also demanding more assistance to countries in the “immediate European Union neighbourhood” like Macedonia and Serbia.
