Brussels: Europe and the Arabs
After the advent of spring and during the summer period, the attempts of organizations active in the field of human trafficking and smuggling of illegal immigrants increase, taking advantage of the calm state of the sea waves, unlike the autumn and winter periods.
And only two weeks had passed since the beginning of the spring season until news began of finding bodies or extracting people on boats in the waters of the Mediterranean that were on their way to the land of dreams in Europe.
Recently, we were talking about what is happening off the coast of Tunisia and other North African countries. Today, news agencies and European newspapers highlight the Italian Coast Guard's assertion that it is trying to rescue 1,200 immigrants on board two ships in the Mediterranean, after it managed to help nearly 2000 people over the weekend, according to the Italian newspaper "El Messaggero".
The newspaper indicated that the authorities rescued 800 migrants who were on a fishing boat, and the boat was found southwest of Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, and according to the Italian Coast Guard, rescuing the migrants is a “complicated” operation due to the crowd on board.
In Italian waters in Capo Passero, the southern part of Sicily, authorities also intercepted another boat with 400 migrants on board.
According to the alarm platform used by migrants at risk, Alarm Phone, people on the boat "panicked".
According to information provided by the Italian Coast Guard, outside of these operations, about 2,000 migrants were rescued from Friday to Sunday in what they described as "a large number of rescue operations".
And the coastal authorities warned of the arrival of thousands of migrants in recent days on the Italian coast, especially on the island of Lampedusa, after making dangerous boat trips in perilous conditions from North Africa.
Last week, the Coast Guard succeeded in rescuing 745 migrants in the Mediterranean Sea after intercepting a boat in the city of Reggio Calabria. The first rescue operation was in the morning when the authorities managed to rescue 295 migrants and brought them to the beach.
According to data provided by the Italian Ministry of the Interior, more than 14,000 have arrived in the European country so far this year, tripling the number of migrants who arrived in the same period in 2022.
This is due to the continuous wave of immigration that worries the European country, and for this reason Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, has approved some measures to contain this phenomenon, such as increasing penalties for those who work with networks of human exploitation and trafficking at sea.