The Mediterranean is now the planet's deadliest migration corridor. Cyclone Harry exposed how European policies, not just storms, are driving the death toll.
Originally published in CounterPunch.
Cyclone Harry tore through the central Mediterranean in mid-January 2026 with a ferocity that shattered records—winds howling at gale force, waves cresting 16 meters, rain falling in sheets across southern Italy, Malta, and Tunisia. On land, the storm flooded homes, created landslides and crippled infrastructure leaving billions of euros worth of devastation in its wake. At sea, it became a slaughter. According to Mediterranea Saving Humans and media reports, at least 27 of 29 boats that left Tunisia’s Sfax region sank during the tempest, with estimates of at least 1,000 migrants feared dead —one of the deadliest single episodes on the central route in recent memory. The Italian coastguard confirmed 380 people unaccounted for from just eight vessels. The UN’s International Organization for Migration warned of hundreds more lost across multiple wrecks over ten days of unrelenting chaos. Some boats also departed from Libya, including a sinking off Tobruk that left at least 51 feared dead.
This is not a tragedy of nature alone. It is a preventable massacre supercharged by Fortress Europe —the EU’s militarized border apparatus that has turned the Mediterranean into the planet’s most lethal migration corridor. More than 30,000 people have died or disappeared here since 2014, according to IOM figures, with 2025 already claiming at least a very conservative estimate of 1,340 lives on the central route before Harry struck. Smugglers exploit extreme weather, knowing European patrols and rescue NGOs are crippled by storms. But the real architects of this graveyard are the policies themselves: pushbacks, criminalization of solidarity, and dirty deals with Tunisia and Libya that externalize border violence to authoritarian regimes. The sea does the rest.
Artwork by Gaia Valmaree Leonardi
Climate change is the accelerant. Rising sea temperatures and intensified storm systems—driven by decades of global emissions—have made the Mediterranean more violent and unpredictable. Cyclone Harry was not an anomaly; it was a preview. Stronger storms, higher waves, and more frequent extremes will multiply the mortal risks for those already forced to flee drought, desertification, war, and poverty from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East. Yet Europe, the historic epicenter of industrial emissions, answers climate displacement not with safe pathways or climate justice but with ever-higher walls, Frontex drones, and detention camps.
Frontex, the European Union’s border and coast guard agency, stands as the continent’s equivalent to ICE—a militarized, unaccountable apparatus designed to externalize and enforce Fortress Europe’s deadly logic. With a budget now exceeding €1 billion annually and a growing fleet of drones, patrol boats, and surveillance technology, Frontex has shifted from rescue coordination to active pushback operations, intercepting migrant boats in international waters and forcing them back to Libya or Tunisia—countries where torture, enslavement, and extortion await returnees. The agency’s role in Cyclone Harry’s catastrophe is damning: while distress signals flooded in via Inmarsat and satellite phones, Frontex assets were either absent, delayed, or focused on deterrence rather than rescue, leaving hundreds to drown in the storm’s grip. Like ICE, Frontex operates with near-total impunity—its officers shielded from accountability, its failures blamed on “weather conditions” or “smuggler recklessness,” and its violence outsourced to third countries through deals that pay dictators to do the dirty work. In the Mediterranean’s deadliest corridor, Frontex does not save lives; it polices borders at the cost of thousands, turning Europe’s southern sea into a mass grave where the EU’s “values” are drowned alongside the people who seek refuge.
Italy under Giorgia Meloni carries a special burden of shame. Her government has gutted NGO rescue missions, criminalized sea solidarity, and boasted of “closed ports.” As Harry raged, Italy’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Center received distress signals via Inmarsat but failed to mount timely or sufficient searches. Mediterranea Saving Humans accused authorities of a “lack of information and rescue efforts,” while survivors from Tunisia and Libya described dozens of “floating mass graves” vanishing without trace.
Italy’s complicity, as the central entry point into the EU, extends beyond the silence at sea to its active role in the EU’s externalized detention regime. In November 2023, Giorgia Meloni signed a controversial agreement with Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama to establish Italian-run migrant detention centers on Albanian soil—one in Gjader for identification and asylum processing, the other in a former military base as an entry screening center into the Shengjin region for repatriation or asylum. The facilities, designed to hold up to 3,000 people at a time, were touted as a “European model” to offload Italy’s border burden. Over the course of a year, the facilities are expected to process up to 36,000 people. Yet as of February 2026, the centers remain empty and non-operational—plagued by legal challenges, human rights concerns, and logistical failures. Italian courts, NGOs, and the European Court of Human Rights have raised alarms over potential violations of the prohibition of forced return, inhumane conditions, and the outsourcing of asylum obligations to a non-EU country with a documented record of weak rule of law. The empty buildings stand as a stark symbol: Meloni’s government is willing to spend millions on a detention archipelago abroad while refusing to open safe, legal pathways or end the deadly pushbacks that claim thousands of lives each year.
The human toll is unbearable: women, children, entire families swallowed by waves in the name of European border control. Harry’s catastrophe lays bare Fortress Europe’s murderous arithmetic: criminalize rescue, externalize borders, ignore climate displacement—and let the sea finish the work of exclusion.
The demand is urgent and non-negotiable: end the criminalization of migration. Abolish pushbacks and dismantle Frontex. Open safe, legal routes for climate and conflict refugees. Confront climate change with justice, not militarized frontiers. Tear down Fortress Europe before it claims another thousand lives.
Michael Leonardi lives in Italy and can be reached at michaeleleonardi@gmail.com.
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