“BREAKING: 25 men & women died at the bottom of boat yesterday, 107 others were rescued by the #Argos from the same rubber raft…,” MSF said on its Twitter account.
It added that 23 of the rescued people had terrible chemical burns, while seven of them had to be evacuated by helicopter to Italy due to severe injuries.
On Tuesday, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said that over 328,000 migrants and refugees had entered Europe by sea in 2016, arriving mostly in Greece and Italy. According to the IOM, over 153,000 migrants have arrived in Italy alone, which is 10 percent more than during the same period in 2015.
Europe has been beset by a massive refugee crisis, with hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants fleeing their crisis-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa to escape violence and poverty. The majority of them cross the Mediterranean Sea and arrive in the European Union using southern EU nations as transit points.