Only moments after casting off from the Djiboutian shore, the vessel capsized. Of the 305 people crammed aboard, at least 139 are now confirmed dead, the UN’s migration agency IOM reported on Sunday, and 84 more are missing. The agency had counted 109 victims earlier in the day before rescuers recovered another 30 bodies.
The vessel sank near Guehere, a stretch of coast beyond the port town of Obock, sometime between Thursday night and Friday dawn. Its passengers were bound for Yemen on the far side of the Bab el-Mandeb. Some eighty passengers made it out alive; every one of them is from Ethiopia. Fifteen children were among the first victims identified.
Even the grim official figure is probably too low. According to Alexandre Coissac, the agency’s top official in the country, it covers only the dead whom authorities have laid to rest. Fellow migrants have buried others themselves, anonymously, in a common grave, and those deaths cannot be counted until officials verify them. Overcrowding, he said, was the main reason the boat capsized so close to land, and local responders were swamped as bodies kept washing ashore. Survivors, many of them swallowing seawater before being pulled out, are receiving medical and psychological care at the agency’s centre in Obock. “They’re all in a state of shock,” Coissac said.
The so-called Eastern Route is one of the busiest and deadliest migration corridors on earth. Every year, people from Ethiopia and other parts of the Horn region make the crossing to Yemen by the tens of thousands, most hoping to reach Saudi Arabia or other Gulf states for work. In 2025 alone, upwards of 900 lost their lives or vanished en route. Renewed fighting in Yemen has not stopped the flow; since early September IOM has recorded over 20,000 arrivals in Djibouti from Ethiopia.
The agency’s chief, Amy Pope, urged governments and donors to open safe, legal pathways, warning that such deaths must not be treated as normal.
