Eritrean woman gives birth on a platform, brought to Lampedusa

A baby girl was born among the rusty pipes of an abandoned oil platform in the heart of the Mediterranean. Just two days old, wrapped in a blanket by Astral volunteers, the little girl was rescued along with 53 other migrants, including another woman who had given birth at sea, after the shipwreck of the dinghy on which they had left Libya three days earlier.

It is one of the many stories on the edge of survival that come from the sea. This time, a tragedy narrowly avoided. "A complex rescue - say the crew of the sailing vessel Astral, of the NGO Open Arms - made even harder by the presence of two newborns and two children. If we had not intervened thanks to the reports from Alarm Phone and the sighting of the Seabird plane, today we would be talking about deaths".

On the way to Lampedusa, the Astral encountered another semi-deflated dinghy, with 109 people on board. Four had ended up in the sea: they were saved on the fly by the crew, who threw life jackets. The rest of the group, which includes 10 children and 8 women, were then taken in charge by the Louise Michel ship, which is heading towards a safe port.

Meanwhile, new arrivals have been counted on the island: three landings in a few hours, for a total of 177 people. They had left from Zuara, Zawia and Tripoli aboard small boats rescued by the coast guard and the finance police. The migrants, coming from Bangladesh, Sudan, Egypt, Pakistan, Somalia, Gambia and Guinea, were transferred to the hotspot on the island, which now hosts about 250 people. Two of them, who landed with clear signs of hydrocarbon poisoning, were hospitalized at the local polyclinic.

The sailing ship of the German NGO Nadir, which last Friday rescued 112 people in the Libyan SAR area, remains blocked at the commercial dock. The captain was notified of a report for not having promptly communicated the rescue operation to the competent coordination centers. Violation of the directives of the Ministry of the Interior was also contested: the ship should have headed towards Porto Empedocle, indicated as a safe port of disembarkation.

Tomorrow a delegation of Fratelli d'Italia will arrive on the island. On the front line are the group leaders in the Chamber and Senate, Galeazzo Bignami and Lucio Malan, together with leaders and senators of the party, including Arianna Meloni. The program includes meetings with the mayor and the coast guard, as well as symbolic visits to the hotspot, the outpatient clinic and the "boat cemetery", a silent and powerful testimony of the many who, in that stretch of sea, did not make it.

In the meantime, among the waves, the work of those who – beyond the verbal and political controversies – reach out and throw life jackets continues. Because every day, in the Mediterranean, the line between life and death is as thin as the edge of a blanket wrapped around a newborn baby in the sea.