More than 150 people have lost their lives in severe flooding in eastern Libya, authorities announced on Monday, while Hurricane Daniel lashed Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece in the Mediterranean.
Residents of the affected area in Libya photographed mudslides, destroyed buildings and entire neighborhoods covered in sewage.
Speaking to Libyan media, Osama Hamad, the prime minister of the eastern government, claimed that “more than 2,000 people are feared dead and thousands are missing” in the city of Derna alone, however, neither medical resources nor emergency services. has confirmed such claims.
While media in eastern Libya have widely picked up on Hamad’s comments, separate outlets reporting from different regions have added little data.
“At least 150 people have died as a result of floods and torrential rains caused by Cyclone Daniel in Durna, Jabal al-Akhdar region and the suburbs of Al-Marj,” Hammad’s Benghazi-based administration spokesman Mohammad Masoud said earlier. are done”. .
“This is in addition to the massive material damage that damaged public and private property,” he said, according to JEE News.
Hundreds of residents are still believed to be trapped in hard-to-reach areas as aid workers, backed by the army, try to rescue them.
Meanwhile, authorities in eastern Libya have lost contact with nine soldiers during the rescue operation, according to Massoud, who also said that Hamad, the head of a rescue committee, and other ministers had been called to assess the extent of the damage. What is the trip to Darna?
Experts described Hurricane Daniel – which has killed at least 27 people as it hit parts of Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria in recent days – as “extreme in terms of the amount of water that fell in a 24-hour period”.
Catastrophic conditions in the East
On Monday, Derna was declared a “disaster zone” by Hamad’s government, which fought alongside the UN-brokered, internationally recognized interim government in war-torn Libya in Tripoli.
The head of Libya’s western government, Abdelhamid Dabibah, declared three days of national mourning and called for the “unity of all Libyans” in the wake of the tragedy during an unprecedented ministerial meeting broadcast live on Libyan television.
The National Petroleum Company, whose main oil fields and terminals are located in eastern Libya, declared a “state of maximum alert” and suspended flights between production sites where activity was significantly limited.
Derna, a city of 100,000, is in a state of disrepair with four major bridges, two buildings and two dams collapsed, according to a city council official. He stressed that the situation requires national and international intervention, which is located 900 kilometers east of Tripoli.
In a statement on Facebook, the head of the Presidential Council, Mohammad al-Manfi, called for “assistance from brotherly and friendly countries and international organizations.”
Manifa officially declared Derna, Shahat and Al Bayda as “disaster zones”.
The storm hit eastern Libya on Sunday afternoon, affecting the coastal town of Jabal al-Akhdar as well as Benghazi, where a curfew was declared and schools were closed for several days.
The UN mission in Libya said on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday that it was “closely monitoring the emergency situation arising from severe weather conditions in the eastern region of the country”.
It expressed condolences over the deaths and said it was “ready to support the efforts of local authorities and municipalities to deal with this emergency and provide immediate humanitarian assistance”.
