Girl, 11, Survives 3 Days at Sea in Inner Tubes

Shortly after 3am on Wednesday, the crew of the Trotamar III, a vessel used by the refugee charity Compass Collective, heard a child's cries in the dark. They found an 11-year-old girl from Sierra Leone floating in the water, clinging to two tire inner tubes—the only apparent survivor of a boat filled with nearly four dozen migrants that sank in the Mediterranean near Italy, reports NBC News. The nonprofit says in a statement that the boat holding around 45, including the girl's young brother, went down off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, after setting sail over the weekend from the Tunisian city of Sfax, per CNN.

The girl, named Yasmine by Italian media and said to have been stranded on the water for three days, was found with just the inner tubes and a life jacket and "had no drinking water or food with her," the charity says in its statement, per NBC. However, "although she was suffering from hypothermia, she was responsive and alert" and is expected to survive. The BBC reports that the girl informed her rescuers that at least two other people had initially survived after nearly 12-foot waves during a storm hit the metal boat they were in, sinking it. However, she said she'd lost contact with those others two days earlier. The other migrants from the boat are all presumed dead.

NBC notes that the Mediterranean is an extremely perilous migration route between North Africa and parts of Europe, with almost 25,000 deaths logged since 2014, according to Compass Collective data. The International Organization for Migration puts that number of dead or missing even higher, at close to 31,000. Just this year alone, upward of 64,000 people have been rescued from the central part of the Mediterranean while headed toward Italy, according to government stats cited by CNN. Of those, almost 8,000 were unaccompanied minors. "Every life matters," Nicola Dell'Arciprete, head of UNICEF in Italy, wrote Wednesday on X. "We need safe routes, search and rescue. Protecting children is a duty." (More survivor stories.)