Rights and Accountability 17 September 2014
Nearly five hundred people are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea after setting sail from Egypt, fleeing countries across North Africa and the Middle East ravaged by war, epidemic and instability.
Many of the people onboard are believed to have been Palestinians from Gaza, thousands of whom are said to have fled since Israel began its devastating 51-day offensive on 7 July.
As testimonies are collected from the handful of survivors, a macabre yet still fragmented story of what caused hundreds of men, women and children to drown at sea is coming to light.
Survivors have told the International Organization for Migration (IOM) that the same men who had taken their money and agreed to transport them to Europe from Egypt turned against the crowded ship when passengers refused to transfer to a smaller, reportedly unsafe boat. At this point, the “smugglers” then deliberately rammed their own ship into the passenger vessel, causing it to sink and take hundreds down with it.
According to one survivor, the three hundred passengers who were packed into the lower deck of the ship were trapped and drowned immediately. Others tried to hold onto debris and other flotation devices and reported seeing their smugglers laughing while watching the ship sink and dozens vanish into the sea.
“After they hit our boat they waited to make sure that it had sunk completely before leaving. They were laughing,” one man told IOM. He also witnessed one man hang himself from despair when the boat was first struck.
“They watched as those thrown in the water clung to each other trying to stay alive,” another survivor told IOM.
Four-day ordeal
Those who did not drown instantly remained at sea for up to four days. On the third day, however, winds picked up and the waves overtook many more people.
The fleeing people are believed to have come from Syria, Gaza, Egypt and Sudan, and the smugglers were reportedly of Palestinian and Egyptian nationality. The boat left Egypt’s port of Damietta near Alexandria on 6 September.
During the first three days of sailing, smugglers required the passengers to switch ships three different times. The fourth time they refused.
Leonard Doyle, a spokesperson for IOM, told The Electronic Intifada that it is unclear why they would require the migrants to change boats but speculated that they could have wanted them to switch to a smaller boat so as to escape detection as they sailed into European ports.
Survivors were scattered at sea and picked up by different boats. After two days, a Panamanian merchant vessel already carrying 386 migrants rescued from a separate incident picked up two Palestinian men aged 27 and 33 and brought them to the Italian port of Pozzola.
Later, a UK vessel picked up five adults and a child and brought and them to Crete.
From Crete, one survivor told IOM how people attempted to stay alive while treading water: “The rest of us linked arms in a circle so that no one else would be lost.”
“IOM uses the terms ‘trafficker’ and ‘smuggler’ interchangeably because they take money from these people for the journey but also exploit them by sending them to their doom,” Doyle said.
“It is an extraordinary abuse of human life. People who are fleeing or people who are refugees.”
IOM has documented 3,000 deaths off the shores of Europe in 2014 alone — more than four times as many as last year, which counted 700. Last October dozens of Syrians and Palestinian refugees fleeing war-torn Syria via Libya drowned off the coast of Italy.
Many Palestinian refugees fleeing violence in Syria have been forced to set sail in these perilous boats due to persecution by an Egyptian regime that has maintained a policy of holding refugees indefinitely until they leave the country, as Human Rights Watch reported last year.
Doyle told The Electronic Intifada that around 100,000 people have survived the trip to Europe this year, indicating that this has become an extremely lucrative business for the traffickers. Each passenger paid approximately $2,000 for the trip — netting the smugglers an estimated one million dollars from this last deadly trip.
Palestinians are believed to pay as much as $4,000 for a passage.
Doyle noted that while this is the first shipwreck in many years with extensive proof that the boat was deliberately sunk, it is impossible to know the circumstances of past shipwrecks.
“We have to have a more robust policy to save people from drowning. It’s not that big of a sea—it shouldn’t take three days to pick them up.”
But Doyle also pointed to the reasons causing people to flee their home countries: “The first thing is you need some political stability in the countries of origin — whether it is Syria, Egypt, Gaza or Libya. There is instability driving people out, economic factors. People are having great difficulty surviving.”
Desperate to escape
Doyle told The Electronic Intifada that the Palestinian survivors have provided the most vivid testimony about how they ended up on the ship.
Palestinian survivors have explained that they left Gaza through one of the remaining tunnels along Gaza’s border with Egypt, then crossed the treacherous Sinai peninsula filled with checkpoints manned by Egyptian officials hostile to Palestinian refugees, finally arriving in Alexandria.
Some said that they used the money they had been granted to rebuild their houses to buy their passage to Europe — the $2,000 ticket includes paying an Egyptian middleman at the Egyptian ports and a place on the a ship, but no food or amenities. Most of the families — including an estimated one hundred children — were heading for Norway, Sweden or Belgium, countries with less restrictive refugee policies.
Ahmed Suhail, a Palestinian diplomat in Greece, told EUobserver that he belives around 250 or 300 of the drowned migrants were Palestinians.
One Palestinian man told Al-Akhbar that he left Gaza not because of war, but because he had no future or hope of finding work.
An already dire economy was further decimated by Israel’s assault this summer. Even before the offensive, approximately half of Gaza workers were unemployed, and the poverty rate stood at 40 percent. More than two thirds of the population is dependent on food aid, the UN reports. A recent International Monetary Fund report predicts that the assault will cause the Gaza economy to contract a further 15 percent.
Al-Dameer, a Gaza-based human rights group, told the Israeli daily Haaretz that it has collected the names of four hundred missing people from Gaza: “No one knows where they are,” the group’s director Khalil Abu Shamala told Haaretz. ”The whole Gaza Strip is talking about it. It’s such a painful story.” Abu Shamala said that most of the Palestinians fleeing were young.
Survivors taken to Crete have provided information on the smugglers to the Egyptian Coast Guard.
Tags
- refugee boats
- leonard doyle
- Gaza
- gaza economy
- refugee
- Egypt
- International Organization for Migration
- Syria
- Libya
- tunnels
- Khalil Abu Shammala
Comments
Drowned refugees
Permalink Reg Vernon replied on
An absolute tragedy. No words can express this inhumanity.
My despair over this. Solution ?
Permalink Allan Petree replied on
After the recent election in Sweden where the refugee hostile party SD dubbled their number to 13% its going to be even harder for refugees. Lack of housing and acceptans is a problem when an additional 60.000 arrives this year.
We must debate this and increase the information to the world. We see an increase nu number unless we can make more Jobs available in the homecountries. Small FARMS should be one alternative. But water ??? And the USA dont seem to learn the Lessons after Iraq. You cant just abandom people after you bombed their opressors !!! It DOES take time to rebuild a country ! The RICH Arab neighbours should take a larger part. EGOISM seems to kill more than war.
It's policy.
Permalink tom hall replied on
Newspapers in the west are full of "comments" accompanying each article on refugees, demanding harsher action against such people. Many insist that those escaping terrible conditions ought to remain where they are and actively work to improve the local situation. Others are more directly xenophobic and racist. But all share a common misperception not only of the dire predicament of refugees, but of the role of wealthy countries in generating the hunger and insecurity that impels populations to flee.
In this instance, EU nations and the US bear a direct responsibility for the destruction of Gaza- indeed, for the long Israeli siege of that occupied territory. The suffering, misery and ultimate horror described in this article are not merely the product of piratical gangs on the high seas. They are a consequence of political decisions made in the capitals of Europe and North America, in support of ghastly regimes in Israel, Egypt, Libya, the ongoing war in Syria, and literally dozens of other conflicts and dictatorships.
It should also be noted that the waters along these routes are very heavily surveilled and patrolled. These vessels with their desperate human cargo are tracked and evaluated by sophisticated means. The repeated catastrophic loss of life is entirely avoidable. Yet it's a de facto policy of many states to allow mass death at sea as a method of discouraging and preventing inward immigration by unwanted peoples. In any reasonable assessment, that's a crime against humanity.
Betrayal of Palestinians
Permalink RockyMissouri replied on
A despicable monstrosity that should never have happened..!! I can't begin to imagine the suffering they had to endure, just to be betrayed in the end.
They shouldn't have to leave their homes...!! They have done nothing wrong!!
Their country of origin should be held accountable.
This is horrifying, along with my nations' part in it. We are all MONSTERS TO ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN!
Lost at Sea
Permalink John el-amin replied on
Mr. Hall, your analysis names sense ; to facilitate the permanent removal of Palestinians , the US/EU/Israel supporters of Zionism, ethnically cleanses Palestine without getting their hands directly bloodied. Some Arab nationals appear complicit. It is a continuing crime against humanity. One day the world wide suffer for the atrocities.