The International Organization for Migration reported on Thursday that more than 43,000 people had been displaced as a result of the flood tragedy in Libya, which left thousands dead in the city of Derna.
Two outdated dams upstream of the coastal city were breached by a flash flood the size of a tsunami after Mediterranean Storm Daniel hit the region on September 10.
It destroyed entire neighborhoods and drove countless numbers of people into the water. The official death toll is around 3,300, but the actual number is anticipated to be far higher; according to foreign assistance organizations, there may be up to 10,000 people still missing.
According to the IOM, “an estimated 43,059 people have been displaced by the floods in northeastern Libya,” and “a lack of water supply is reportedly forcing many displaced out of Derna” to neighboring locations.
Food, clean water, mental health care, and psychological support were all listed as urgent requirements. In the meantime, mobile and internet services were resumed after a two-day outage as a result of protests on Monday, during which irate citizens blamed the government for the high death toll.
Authorities put the “rupture in the optical fiber” connecting to Derna as the cause of the communications outage, but several internet users and analysts claimed there had been a planned “blackout”.
In a tweet on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday, Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibah of Tripoli declared that communications had been resumed in the east.
The conflict-torn nation of Libya is still divided between Khalifa Haftar’s military strongman government in the disaster-stricken east and Dbeibah’s UN-supported and ostensibly transitional administration in the west.
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