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Bodies wash ashore in Italy and Libya, relatives make phone calls that go unanswered, and migrants’ tents are found abandoned after night. In a pattern rights groups and international agencies say has become harder to document, migrants trying to reach Europe are disappearing in the Mediterranean in what is sometimes called “invisible shipwrecks,” while governments responsible for search and rescue withhold or restrict information.
The scale of the disappearances has climbed in early 2026, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. The IOM said the beginning of the year ranks as the deadliest start to any year for people crossing the Mediterranean, with 682 confirmed missing as of March 16—and it said the real death toll is likely higher than the confirmed figures.
Human rights groups say one reason the death toll remains uncertain is that authorities in countries along the route are increasingly limiting what information is available to journalists and aid organizations. The AP reported that the lack of transparency prevents journalists from confirming reports of rescues, disappearances and shipwrecks.
A researcher who focuses on migration and data at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, Matteo Villa, described the approach as “a strategy of silence.” Villa said human rights groups have been warning since late January about large numbers of missing people after Cyclone Harry struck the region, but that authorities have not confirmed, denied or corrected those accounts.
The storm also complicates efforts to verify outcomes when boats have not been consistently tracked. Refugees in Libya said it was difficult to be precise about who was aboard because “there is no central system recording departures, losses, or recoveries,” but it warned the death toll was likely even higher. Refugees in Libya founder David Yambio told AP that the group was “looking at boats that never counted how many kids are inside.”
The AP reported that even the IOM’s Missing Migrants Project has struggled to verify many cases. Julia Black, who leads the IOM Missing Migrants Project, said last year there were at least 1,500 people reported missing whose fates IOM could not confirm, and that the issue continued into 2026. Black said the project created a new secondary dataset for what it calls “unverifiable cases,” and that for 2026 it already had more than 400 missing people it could not verify.
Black said the problem is worsening in part because humanitarian organizations that once helped fill information gaps are less able to do so as funding cuts and government-imposed restrictions spread across the region. She also said IOM is seeing “the restriction of access for humanitarian actors,” and that this is now accompanied by “even the restriction of information.”
In the aftermath of Cyclone Harry, officials in Italy, Tunisia and Malta have not responded to questions from AP, according to the report. AP said it repeatedly asked authorities why they were not sharing information related to migrant rescues at sea and what their policies are, and that it received no response. The AP reported that the Italian coast guard also did not answer five email requests seeking information about boats reported missing and search efforts, and that an officer who answered the phone said the coast guard did not have “any further verified and confirmed information regarding the circumstances,” while a Freedom of Information request was still pending.
According to the AP, the Italian coast guard declined to comment on an alert it issued on Jan. 24 asking vessels between the island of Lampedusa and Tunisia to be on the lookout for eight small boats in distress carrying some 380 people. Italian journalist Sergio Scandura made that alert public, AP said. The AP also reported that the Tunisian Foreign Ministry and Tunisian National Guard did not respond to repeated requests for information.
The report describes only one known survivor from the boats reported missing during Cyclone Harry. AP said the man was floating in the water when a merchant vessel rescued him on Jan. 22, and that he 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. AP said the deaths were included in IOM’s tally based on his testimony, and that the survivor was evacuated to Malta according to the captain. The report said the Maltese Armed Forces did not respond to requests about whether they recovered the man and bodies.
Beyond the specific cyclone case, AP said the broader information problem affects how missing deaths are recorded. It reported that until mid-2024, Tunisian authorities regularly shared numbers of migrants intercepted at sea, but that the approach changed after Tunisia’s crackdown on migrants on land following a 2023 deal with Europe to curb migration in exchange for financial aid. AP reported that in June 2024, Tunisia’s Ministry of Interior stopped releasing information on migrants, citing security reasons, and that a spokesperson for FTDES, the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, said the motives were political.
Italy’s reduction of information, Villa said, has been longer-running. AP reported that the Italian coast guard used to provide detailed monthly data on migrants rescued, that monthly reports became quarterly before stopping completely in 2020, and that in 2022 previous reports were removed from the coast guard’s website. AP also said this year the 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.
In its response to AP, the European border agency Frontex said it spotted eight boats carrying about 160 migrants between Jan. 14 and 24 when the cyclone hit. Frontex told AP that six boats were rescued by Italian authorities, but that the fate of the other two remains unknown.
For people waiting for news, the lack of answers can linger for weeks. AP said on Feb. 8 migrants held a memorial ceremony near Sfax, praying and crying as they assumed their loved ones could not be alive after so many days without news. In a video shared by Refugees in Libya, Dr. Ibrahim Fofana, a migrant in Tunisia whose relatives have been missing since late January, said, “All of us here are in deep trauma, are in deep agony,” and pleaded for authorities to identify bodies that washed ashore in Italy.
“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. Villa said the pattern of withholding information has become even more pronounced after Cyclone Harry, describing it as political strategy to repress as much information as possible from the public.