Premature twins in hospital after rescue from boat off Libya

The Italian coastguard on Tuesday rescued some 3,000 migrants in the Strait of Sicily with the aid of the EU’s border agency Frontex and humanitarian organizations, bringing the total to almost 10,000 in two days.

The twin babies were just 5 days old, a month premature and ill-equipped for a risky journey across the Mediterranean Sea.

Migrants and refugees are still fleeing their homes and going to extremes to reach Europe, despite closed borders and increasingly stringent immigration laws.

THOUSANDS of refugees were rescued from a fleet of small wooden boats in a major operation off the coast of Libya yesterday.

About 15 miles off the coast, she and her children were rescued by Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF.

Aid agencies found asylum seekers suffering from hypothermia, fevers, dehydration and skin diseases after rescuing them from overloaded rubber dinghies and wooden fishing boats.

The International Organization for Migration, or IOM, says that in 2015 and the first half of this year, more than 6,600 people drowned or went missing in the Mediterranean after their boats capsized.

Most of the migrants from the Horn of Africa and the west of the continent set out from the Libyan town of Sabratha, just 300 kilometres (180 miles) across the Mediterranean from the Italian island of Lampedusa. The total number of arrivals in Italy this year, prior to Monday s rescues, was at around 105,000, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Many of them using the central Mediterranean route, which runs roughly from Libya or other north African countries to Italy, are from Nigeria, Eritrea and Gambia, according to the IOM.

Most of the deaths in 2016 came from people risking this particular route, which is considered dramatically more unsafe.

The instability in Libya has made the country a hub for people-trafficking.

According to the IOM, migrants are taking advantage of Libya’s ongoing political chaos to escape over the mostly open borders.

Tesfamamrim Merhawit, 26, from Eritrea, mother of two five-day-old babies, recovers in a hospital bed in the Sicilian city of Palermo.

The EU naval operation commanded from Rome aims primarily to protect European borders from the unprecedented influx of migrants attempting to reach the bloc’s southern shores by paying smugglers to place them on overcrowded vessels and to prevent the loss of migrants’ lives at sea.