ROME (AP) — Bodies washing ashore day after day. Phone calls from relatives going unanswered. Migrants’ tents abandoned overnight.
Migrants trying to reach Europe are vanishing in droves in what are known as “invisible shipwrecks” but governments responsible for search and rescue are withholding information about what they know.
The beginning of 2026 ranks as the deadliest start to any year for people trying to cross the Mediterranean — an unprecedented 682 confirmed missing as of March 16 — according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. But the real death toll is almost certainly much higher.
Human rights groups are increasingly struggling to verify tolls as Italy, Tunisia and Malta have quietly restricted information on migrant rescues and shipwrecks along the deadliest migration route in the world. The news barely makes headlines, in part because the lack of transparency prevents journalists from confirming reports.
“It’s a strategy of silence,” said Matteo Villa, a researcher focusing on migration and data at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies think tank.
The organization Refugees in Libya and other human rights groups have been sounding the alarm since late January, reporting more than 1,000 people missing after Cyclone Harry hit the region. But authorities have not confirmed, denied or corrected those reports.
In the weeks that followed the cyclone, more than 20 decomposing bodies washed ashore in Italy and Libya while other human remains were spotted floating in the middle of the sea.
For the families of missing migrants, not knowing their fate is excruciating.
“Europe should know that these people who got drowned in the sea have family members, have dreams, have passions,” Josephus Thomas, a migrant from Sierra Leone and community leader in Tunisia’s coastal town of El Amra, told AP.
Even the U.N.'s migration agency is increasingly unable to verify cases of migrants who die in what is known as “invisible shipwrecks” because of the growing lack of information.
Last year, at least 1,500 people were reported missing whose fates IOM could not confirm, said Julia Black, who leads the organization's Missing Migrants Project. The issue persists 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. For this year, they already have more than 400 missing they could not verify.
Many humanitarian organizations that previously filled some of the information gaps are no longer able to do so because of the global wave of funding cuts and government-imposed restrictions across the region.
“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.
The Associated Press repeatedly asked authorities in Tunisia, Italy and Malta why they aren’t sharing information related to migrant rescues at sea and what their policies are. Not one responded.
Over the years, authorities in the Mediterranean have gradually reduced information related to migrants. But their silence was even more pronounced in late January after Cyclone Harry unleashed heavy rainfall, winds of 100 kph (62 mph), and 9-meter-tall (30 feet) waves.
Hundreds of people had departed from Tunisia’s coastal region of Sfax and disappeared, according to information the group Refugees in Libya gathered from migrants in Tunisia and their relatives abroad.
The group acknowledged it was difficult to be precise “because there is no central system recording departures, losses, or recoveries," but it warned that the death toll was likely even higher.
“We are looking at boats that never counted how many kids are inside,” Refugees in Libya founder David Yambio told AP.
The AP sent five email requests to the Italian coast guard seeking information on the boats reported missing and search efforts but received no response. An officer who answered the phone said the coast guard did not have “any further verified and confirmed information regarding the circumstances.” AP also filed a Freedom of Information request, which is pending.
The coast guard also declined to comment on an alert it issued on Jan. 24 asking vessels sailing between the Italian island of Lampedusa and Tunisia to be on the lookout for eight small boats in distress carrying some 380 people. The alert was made public by Italian journalist Sergio Scandura.
There is only one known survivor from the boats reported missing during Cyclone Harry. He was floating in the water when a merchant vessel rescued him on Jan. 22. The man told crew members he had been traveling with another 50 people, some of whose bodies could be seen in the water in video of the rescue. Thanks to his testimony, their deaths were included in IOM's tally.
According to the captain, the survivor was evacuated to Malta. The Maltese Armed Forces did not respond to multiple requests about their involvement or reports that they recovered the man and the bodies.
The Tunisian Foreign Ministry and the Tunisian National Guard also have not responded to multiple requests for information by email and phone.
Frontex, a European Union agency that assists nations with border surveillance, told AP that it spotted eight boats carrying about 160 migrants between Jan. 14 and 24 when the cyclone hit. It said six boats were rescued by Italian authorities, but the fate of the other two remains unknown.
On Feb. 8, migrants prayed and cried during a memorial ceremony in the olive groves near Sfax, presuming their loved ones could not be alive after so many days without news.
“All of us here are in deep trauma, are in deep agony,” Dr. Ibrahim Fofana, a migrant in Tunisia whose relatives have been missing since late January, said in a video shared by Refugees in Libya. He pleaded for authorities to identify the bodies that washed ashore in Italy.
Until mid-2024, Tunisian authorities regularly shared the number of migrants they were intercepting at sea, eager to show their European partners compliance with a 2023 deal to curb migration in exchange for financial aid. But the deal was also followed by a brutal crackdown against migrants on land that resulted in thousands being detained or dumped in the desert.
Nongovernmental organizations such as the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, known by its French acronym FTDES, which used to compile and share reports on migrant interceptions, were also caught in the crackdown.
In June 2024, Tunisia's Ministry of Interior stopped releasing any information on migrants, citing security reasons, said Romdhane Ben Amor, FTDES' spokesperson. But in his opinion, the motives were political. The numbers were incompatible with the narrative that Tunisia was not Europe's border guard, he said.
Italy's erosion of information on migrant rescues is even older than Tunisia's. The Italian coast guard used to provide detailed monthly data on migrants rescued. The monthly reports became quarterly before stopping completely in 2020, Villa said. In 2022, previous reports were also removed from the coast guard’s website.
This year, the Italian coast guard did not share any migration-related press releases despite nearly 5,000 migrants disembarking on Italian shores, according to Italy's Interior Ministry statistics.
“It is very clearly a political strategy to repress as much information as possible from the public," Villa said.
Brito reported from Barcelona, Spain. Trisha Thomas contributed to this report from Rome.
FILE-- Migrants from Syria and Libya in a wooden boat call for help as they are assisted by Spanish NGO Open Arms during a rescue operation inside Malta's SAR zone south of the Italian island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean Sea, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)
In this photo taken on Sunday, Sept. 8, 2019, the sun shines over international waters north of Libya in the Mediterranean Sea. (AP Photo/Renata Brito)
FILE-- Migrants from Syria and Libya in a wooden boat call for help as they are assisted by Spanish NGO Open Arms during a rescue operation inside Malta's SAR zone south of the Italian island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean sea, Thursday, Aug. 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)
