Lebanon – The death toll from the sinking of a migrant boat rises, and the Mufti calls for calm

The death toll from the sinking of a migrant boat in Lebanon has risen to seven, following a new victim was found. There are different accounts regarding the number of passengers on the boat and why it sank. He called the families of the victims for a “day of anger”, while the Mufti called for calm, stressing that it will not pass without accountability.

Rescue teams in Lebanon continue today (Monday, April 25, 2025) to search for those missing from the sinking of a migrant boat late last Saturday, while the army was trying to stop it off the Lebanese coast.

Dozens of people were on the boat, and the incident is the worst in years, especially with the repeated attempts of illegal immigration by sea, to escape the economic collapse that has afflicted Lebanon since the summer of 2019.

An official in the port of Tripoli said on Monday that the Lebanese army had found another body in an accident Migrant boat sank At sea off the coast of northern Lebanon overnight, the death toll rose to seven as rescue efforts continued.

“The body of a woman from the Al-Nimr family was recovered today from the Tripoli beach,” Ahmed Tamer, director general of the port of Tripoli, told AFP.

During the past two days, the army recovered the bodies of six people, including a girl.

Ahmed Tamer told Archyde.com that the search operations are continuing, and he said that the rescue operations continued throughout the night…”, adding that “those on board the boat are Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians.”

With the deteriorating economic and living conditions, the number of migrants trying to flee by sea doubled, and their destination is often Cyprus. It began with Palestinian and Syrian refugees who did not hesitate to take the dangerous journey, before Lebanese also resorted to the same thing.

Invitation to “Day of Rage”

There are conflicting information regarding the number of passengers on the boat. The Lebanese Red Cross had announced the day before yesterday, Saturday, that the boat sank with regarding 60 people on board, while the United Nations spoke of at least 84 people, women, men and children, noting that “many” are still missing. On Sunday, the army announced that 48 people had been brought back to the beach.

The circumstances of the accident are also not yet clear. While the survivors accused the navy of sinking the boat while trying to arrest it, the army said that the captain of the boat carried out “maneuvers to escape (…) in a way that led to it crashing.”

The military said the boat capsized because it was overloaded. In a tweet via its Twitter account, the army said: “The search and rescue operations it is carrying out by land, sea and air continues following the boat, which was carrying dozens of people, sank off the shores of Tripoli.”

Mufti: It cannot pass without accountability

Over the weekend, relatives of the victims gathered outside hospitals in Tripoli, where the wounded were being treated. A few men waited outside the port on Monday morning, hoping to find their missing loved ones.

The families of the deceased called for a “day of rage” in Tripoli, coinciding with the funeral of a number of victims at noon on Monday. The funeral of one of the victims in the Bab al-Tabbaneh area was accompanied by heavy gunfire in the air.

For his part, the Grand Mufti of Lebanon, Sheikh Abdul Latif Derian, called today, Monday, “the people of Tripoli, the north, and Akkar to calm down and deliberate until a transparent investigation is conducted by the army command and the competent judiciary to uncover the circumstances of the disaster that cannot pass without accountability and punishment of all those who caused this heinous crime.”

Today, the National News Agency quoted Derian as saying that “the state is responsible for the deterioration of the dangerous situation that the citizen has reached, which made him try to leave his country into the unknown, by any means to secure a decent livelihood because of the living suffering that haunts him daily.”

The economic crisis in Lebanon caused the local currency to lose more than 90 percent of its value and prompted waves of Lebanese and Syrian refugees to try to travel to Europe on small boats.

H.Z/ S.M. (Archyde.com/ dpa/ AFP)