“The death toll is huge, and around 10,000 are reported missing,” Tamer Ramadan, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) delegation in Libya, said Tuesday during a press briefing in Geneva.
As many as 6,000 people are missing from the eastern city of Derna alone, Othman Abduljalil, health minister in Libya’s eastern parliament-backed government, told Libya’s Almasar TV.
“The situation was catastrophic. The bodies are still lying in many places,” Abduljalil told Libya’s Almasar TV.
“There are families still stuck inside their homes, and there are victims under the rubble… I expect people have been washed away into the sea, and tomorrow (Tuesday) morning, we’ll find many of them,” he said.
Derna is just one area affected by flooding that has swept across several cities in the country’s northeast, bordering the Mediterranean Sea.
There are fears that aid efforts may be hampered by political fractures in the country, which has seen a decade-long power struggle between two rival administrations, one in the east and one in the west.
The rain is the result of a very strong low-pressure system that brought catastrophic flooding to Greece last week and moved into the Mediterranean before developing into a tropical-like cyclone known as a medicane. The weather system is similar to tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic or typhoons in the Pacific.
On Monday, Libya’s Red Crescent Society estimated that more than 300 people had died in Derna, according to a post on social media. BBC
