According to witnesses, the vessel left Lebanon’s northern Minyeh area on Tuesday with between 120 and 150 passengers on board.
Authorities in Syria discovered 34 deaths and rescued more than a dozen migrants off the shore of Tartus, Syria’s northern port city, on Thursday, suspected of leaving north Lebanon heading for Europe earlier this week.
Syrian port director-general Samer Qubrusli told Reuters that police had discovered 34 deaths and rescued 14 persons in Syrian seas by Thursday evening.
According to witnesses, the boat departed Lebanon’s northern Minyeh area on Tuesday with between 120 and 150 individuals on board, according to the Syrian transport ministry.
Syrian Transport Minister Zuhair Khuzaim notified Lebanese Transport Minister Ali Hamiye that 33 dead had been retrieved and 16 persons had been rescued.
Lebanon has experienced a surge in migration due to one of the world’s worst economic crises since the 1850s.
Aside from Lebanese, many individuals going on migrant boats are already refugees from Syria and Palestine.
Earlier on Thursday, dozens of people protested in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli to inform authorities that they had lost contact with a migrant boat carrying dozens of people bound for Italy.
Reuters could not determine whether it was the same boat named by Syrian authorities.
According to the Syrian transport ministry, at 4:30 p.m., the director of the small island port of Arwad off the coast of Tartus alerted them that a drowned individual had been spotted near a moored ship.
The ministry dispatched a boat to retrieve the deceased.
It then discovered a youngster’s body, and other bodies began to appear.
According to the ministry, most fatalities and survivors were found near Arwad.
Due to weather circumstances, particularly heavy seas, rescue activities had been halted overnight.
The Lebanese army claimed on Wednesday that it rescued 55 people from a malfunctioning boat in the country’s territorial seas and pulled it back to land.
A migrant boat leaving from near Tripoli sunk in April after being intercepted by the Lebanese navy off the country’s coast.
Roughly 80 Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian migrants were on board, with 40 rescued, seven confirmed dead, and around 30 officially missing.
According to Reuters earlier this month, the number of persons who fled or attempted to depart Lebanon by sea roughly increased in 2021 compared to 2020.
Compared to the same period last year, it increased by more than 70% in 2022.
The primary reasons given were an “inability to subsist in Lebanon owing to the deteriorating economic situation” and a “lack of access to basic amenities and restricted work possibilities,” according to the report.
