BODIES washing ashore day after day. Phone calls from relatives going unanswered. Tents abandoned overnight.
Migrants trying to reach Europe are vanishing in what are known as “invisible shipwrecks” – disasters with no confirmed wreck, no official count and often no survivors to tell the story.
The beginning of 2026 is already the deadliest start to any year on the Mediterranean route.
At least 682 people were confirmed missing by mid-March, according to the United Nations’ International Organisation for Migration (IOM). The real toll is almost certainly far higher.
Human rights groups say they are increasingly unable to verify deaths as governments responsible for search and rescue quietly restrict information about shipwrecks and rescues along the world’s deadliest migration corridor.
The result is a story that barely registers.
“It’s a strategy of silence,” said Matteo Villa, a researcher on migration data at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies.
Groups such as Refugees in Libya began raising alarms in late January, reporting more than 1,000 people missing after Cyclone Harry swept through the central Mediterranean. Authorities have neither confirmed nor denied the figures.
In the weeks after the storm, more than 20 decomposing bodies washed ashore in Italy and Libya. Other human remains were spotted drifting at sea.
For families, the absence of answers is its own form of suffering.
“Europe should know that these people who got drowned in the sea have family members, have dreams, have passions,” said Josephus Thomas, a Sierra Leonean migrant and community leader in the Tunisian coastal town of El Amra.
Even the IOM, long a key source of data on migrant deaths, says it is losing sight of the crisis.
Last year, at least 1,500 people were reported missing in cases the organisation could not verify, said Julia Black, who leads its Missing Migrants Project. The problem is worsening in 2026.
“We started a new secondary data set of what we are calling unverifiable cases because it’s just become so many,” Black said. This year alone, more than 400 cases have already fallen into that category.
The information gap is widening as humanitarian groups face funding cuts and tighter restrictions on their work across North Africa and southern Europe.
“We’ve seen the restriction of access for humanitarian actors, which is not right. And now we’re seeing even the restriction of information,” Black said.
Authorities in Tunisia, Italy and Malta did not respond to repeated requests for comment on their policies or the lack of transparency.
Over time, information on migration has been steadily reduced.
But the silence deepened sharply after Cyclone Harry struck in late January, bringing heavy rain, winds of up to 100kph and waves reaching 9m.
Hundreds of people are believed to have set off from Tunisia’s coastal region of Sfax during the storm and never arrived, according to Refugees in Libya, which compiled accounts from migrants and their families.
The group said precise figures were impossible “because there is no central system recording departures, losses, or recoveries”, but warned the death toll was likely higher than reported.
“We are looking at boats that never counted how many kids are inside,” said its founder, David Yambio.
Efforts to obtain official information have yielded little.
The Italian coast guard did not respond to emailed questions about missing boats or search operations.
An officer who answered the phone said there was no “further verified and confirmed information”. A Freedom of Information request remains pending.
The coast guard also declined to comment on a Jan 24 alert – made public by journalist Sergio Scandura – asking vessels between Tunisia and the Italian island of Lampedusa to watch for eight small boats in distress carrying around 380 people.
There is only one known survivor from those boats. He was rescued by a merchant vessel on Jan 22 after being found floating at sea.
He told the crew he had been travelling with about 50 others, some of whose bodies were visible in the water – testimony that allowed IOM to include their deaths in its count.
According to the ship’s captain, the man was later transferred to Malta. The Maltese armed forces did not respond to questions about the case or reports that they recovered both the survivor and bodies.
Tunisian authorities have also remained silent.
Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, said it detected eight boats carrying around 160 migrants between Jan 14 and 24, when the cyclone hit. Six were rescued by Italian authorities; the fate of the remaining two is unknown.
On Feb 8, migrants gathered in olive groves near Sfax for a memorial, praying and mourning loved ones presumed lost.
“All of us here are in deep trauma, are in deep agony,” said Dr Ibrahim Fofana, whose relatives have been missing since late January, in a video shared by Refugees in Libya. He urged authorities to identify bodies recovered along the coast.
The current information blackout marks a shift from recent years.
Until mid-2024, Tunisian authorities regularly published figures on migrant interceptions at sea, keen to demonstrate cooperation with European partners under a 2023 deal aimed at curbing migration in exchange for financial aid.
That deal was followed by a harsh crackdown on migrants on land, with thousands detained or expelled into desert areas.
Non-governmental organisations were also affected. The Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, which once compiled detailed migration data, saw its work curtailed.
In June 2024, Tunisia’s interior ministry stopped releasing migration figures altogether, citing security concerns. Its spokesperson, Romdhane Ben Amor, said the reasons were political.
The data, he argued, conflicted with official claims that Tunisia was not acting as Europe’s border guard.
Italy’s retreat from transparency began earlier.
The Italian coast guard once issued detailed monthly reports on rescue operations. These became quarterly, then ceased altogether in 2020, Villa said. Earlier reports were later removed from its website.
This year, despite nearly 5,000 migrants arriving on Italian shores, the coast guard has not published a single migration-related press release.
“It is very clearly a political strategy to repress as much information as possible from the public,” Villa said. — AP
