Dozens of barges, dinghies and small boats leaving the port of Sfax organized in groups or prey to smugglers.
The flood of migrants crossing the Tunisian route to reach the Italian coasts seems uncontainable: in the last 24 hours there have been over three thousand migrants who have set off and more than sixty have disembarked.
In the North African state, the economic crisis and political tension has caused a vertiginous increase in migratory flows which is now alarming Europe and the Italian government.
But Tunis is only a transit area for setting sail towards the Mediterranean: the refugees who leave are originally from Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Guinea, Sierra Leone, Syria, Tunisia, Morocco and Burkina Faso, many say they having paid three thousand Tunisian dinars for the crossing.
Migrants, 400 land in Pozzallo from the ship Diciotti
And the activity of the local Coast Guard is relentless, reporting that in the last three days they have thwarted 79 departure attempts, rescuing 2,982 people aboard boats in difficulty off the coast of Sfax and Chebba.
Rescues also continue in the Italian SAR (search and rescue) area.
There are 2,500 migrants already rescued by our authorities, between Sicily and Calabria, under the coordination of the Coast Guard.
Another 190 shipwrecked are on board the Geo Barents, the ship of Doctors Without Borders, bound for the port of Bari while 78 were recovered by Emergency Life Support in Maltese waters.
In Lampedusa, in addition to the people rescued by the NGO-ship Louise Michel financed by Banksy, another 294 arrived in various autonomous landings.
The Imbriacola district hotspot, already overloaded,
it reached the record of over 2,250 arrivals in twenty-four hours compared to just under four hundred places and around fifty landings were recorded on the island.
Rescues and arrivals are increasing, but the dead are also multiplying.
Migrants, landings in the port of Lampedusa: other boats have arrived
The latest drama at sea took place in the Maltese Sar area where, after the sinking of two small boats, at least seven bodies were recovered by the patrol boats of the Coast Guard and the Italian yellow flames who intervened.
The harbor master's office managed to rescue about ten people while others were recovered by a Tunisian fishing boat that was in the area, then escorted to the port of Lampedusa.
Just a few hours earlier, off the Tunisian coast, contact had been lost with thirty-four migrants from sub-Saharan African countries: they are still missing after the boat on which they were traveling sank.
"Without being able to reach most of the boats, we are trying to establish which ones arrived, intercepted or capsized. Great rescue efforts are needed",
explains Alarm Phone, the independent support organization for migrants crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe.
The latter also reported a boat in danger with about 84 people off the coast of Libya, but the activists of Sos Mediterranée who had approached the boat would have been threatened by the Libyan authorities who would have fired shots in the air.
There are also those who will already have to go back.
In Syracuse, the questore issued 52 refoulement orders for as many Egyptian migrants who arrived in Augusta last Thursday night after being intercepted offshore by the Port Authority: they were part of a group of 83 which also included 24 Syrian asylum seekers and now they will have to leave the national territory within a week.