North Africa has been hit by natural disasters in recent days. Although the deaths in Morocco after the terrible earthquake on Friday are close to 3,000, in Libya, a nearby country, the number of deaths from Cyclone Daniel, which crossed the northeast of the country last Sunday, reached 6,238, while the missing number exceeded 9,100 in the city of Derna alone.the most affected, according to provisional figures from the authorities that control the east of the country.
Derna is the fourth largest city in the country, with 120,000 inhabitants, and it is surrounded by a mountain range, making it inaccessible by land since Sunday, without electricity or telecommunications services. The spokesman for the Ambulance and Emergency Service, Osama Ali, described the situation as “tragic” and highlighted the difficulties of the rescue teams in the face of the division of the city into two parts after the collapse of two dams that released more than 33 million liters of water in the center of the capital, washing away residential areas, bridges and roads in its path.
The person in charge appreciated the experience in the management of natural disasters of the international teams that arrived in the country in the last hours as well as the forensic investigation teams for the identification work of the hundreds of corpses that crowd the coasts and public squares waiting to be transferred to the morgues of neighboring municipalities.
The lack of resources has forced rescuers to extract hundreds of victims from the rubble with household utensils and bury them in mass graves in the Martouba cemetery, about twenty kilometers away. The Government of National Unity (GUN), based in Tripoli and recognized by the international community, Tareq al Kharaz, revealed that 1,300 bodies have already been identified and buried while entire families are unaccounted for as a result of the torrential rains, which makes recognition work difficult.
The Council of Ministers approved this Tuesday the allocation of a budget of 384 million euros for the Benghazi and Derna reconstruction fund, and 96 million euros for the victims once a census is carried out in the areas declared damaged in Derna, Benghazi, Al Bayda, Al Marj and Soussa.
After hitting Greece and Türkiye, Cyclone Daniel was downgraded to a subtropical storm on September 9 and began to weaken this Monday as it headed towards neighboring Egypt, according to a report from the Arab Regional Meteorological Center. The opposing authorities of the east and west, who divide the executive power, asked the international community for humanitarian aid this Monday and decreed three days of national mourning throughout the territory.
