Migrants who set out in dozens of flimsy boats launched by smugglers on Tunisian shores have disembarked on three tiny Italian islands in a span of two days, officials said. Separately, a charity vessel carried out 15 rescue operations and the Italian Coast Guard on Sunday recovered a body off the western coast of Sicily from a shipwreck. Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni has repeatedly encouraged Tunisia to put an end to the near daily launching of multiple vessels from its ports. But in the last 10 days there has been a spate of boats capsized, shipwrecked or otherwise in distress. Tens of thousands of migrants have set out this year from northern African shores to try reach Europe.
Last week, a merchant ship took aboard four survivors who were adrift in a smugglers’ engineless boat, They recounted how they had been tossed into the sea when towering waves knocked over their vessel and that 41 fellow passengers didn’t survive, a tragedy Pope Francis spoke of when greeting the public on Sunday in St. Peter’s Square. “With sorrow and shame, we must say that from the beginning of the year, almost 2,000 men, women and children have lost their lives in sea trying to reach Europe,” the pontiff said, referring to the number of known dead cited in recent days by U.N. agencies. “It’s an open wound on our humanity. Since Friday, migrants rescued from more than 60 boats stepped ashore on Lampedusa island, including some 400 people early Sunday.
