Death toll reaches 6,000 in Libya after catastrophic flood UPDATED

More than 36,000 people have been displaced due to floods in Libya, the UN migration agency said on September 13.

“At least 30,000 individuals displaced in Derna due to Storm Daniel, with 3,000 in Albayda, 1,000 in Almkheley, and 2,085 individuals still displaced in Benghazi,” the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Libya said on X social media platform, Anadolu reports.


The UN agency estimated that the death toll since September 10 mounts to 2,000 with 5,000 people still missing.

“Storm Daniel caused significant infrastructure damage, including the road network, and disrupted the telecommunications network,” IOM said in a statement.


Earlier on Wednesday, Saadeddin Abdul Wakil, the undersecretary of the unity government’s Health Ministry, told Anadolu that the death toll surged past 6,000, while thousands remain missing.

On September 11, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent put the figure of missing people at 10,000.

Torrential rains from Storm Daniel swept several areas on September 10 in eastern Libya, most notably Benghazi, Al-Bayda and Al-Marj, as well as Soussa and Derna.

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More than 5,000 people are presumed dead and 10,000 missing after heavy rains in northeastern Libya caused two dams to collapse, surging more water into already inundated areas.

Tamer Ramadan, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies delegation in Libya, gave the numbers of missing people during a briefing to reporters in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 13, CNN reports.

“The death toll is huge,” she said.

At least 5,300 people are thought dead, said the interior ministry of Libya’s eastern government on September 13, state media LANA reported. CNN has not been able to independently verify the number of deaths or those missing.

Of those who were killed, at least 145 were Egyptian, officials in the northeastern city of Tobruk, in Libya, said on September 13.

In the eastern city of Derna, which has seen the worst of the devastation, as many as 6,000 people remain missing, Othman Abduljalil, health minister in Libya’s eastern administration, told Libya’s Almasar TV. He called the situation “catastrophic,” when he toured the city on September 11.

Whole neighbourhoods are believed to have been washed away in the city, according to authorities.

Hospitals in Derna are no longer operable and the morgues are full, said Osama Aly, an Emergency and Ambulance service spokesperson.

Dead bodies have been left outside the morgues on the sidewalks, he told CNN.

“There are no first-hand emergency services. People are working at the moment to collect the rotting bodies,” said Anas Barghathy, a doctor currently volunteering in Derna.

Relatives of people who lived in the destroyed city of Derna told CNN they were terrified after seeing videos of the flooding, with no word from their family members.

Ayah, a Palestinian woman with cousins in Derna, said she has been unable to reach them since the floods.

“I’m really worried about them. I have two cousins who live in Derna. It seems all communications are down and I don’t know if they are alive at this point. It is very terrifying watching the videos coming out of Derna. We are all terrified,” she said.

Emad Milad, a resident of Tobrok, said eight of his relatives died in the flooding in Derma.

“My wife Areej’s sister and her husband both passed away. His whole family is also dead. A total of eight people are all gone. It’s a disaster. It’s a disaster. We are praying for better things,” he said on September 13.

The rain, which has swept across several cities in Libya’s north-east, 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 deadly storm comes in an unprecedented year of climate disasters and record-breaking weather extremes, from devastating wildfires to oppressive heat.

Just as ocean temperatures around the world soar off the charts due to planet-warming pollution, the temperature of the Mediterranean is well-above average, which scientists say fueled the storm’s heavy rainfall.

“The warmer water does not only fuel those storms in terms of rainfall intensity, it also makes them more ferocious,” Karsten Haustein, climate scientist and meteorologist at Leipzig University in Germany, told the Science Media Center.