Libya

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration may deport migrants to Libya for the first time this week, three U.S. officials said on Tuesday, as part of his immigration crackdown and despite Washington's past condemnation of Libya's harsh treatment of detainees.

Two of the officials said the U.S. military could fly the migrants to the North African country as soon as Wednesday, but stressed that plans could still change.

The FBI approved a book manuscript in 2023 from its lead investigator in the Benghazi terror attack probe that confirms frontline agents and prosecutors believed politics kept the Justice Department from approving operations to capture several conspirators, supporting a key part of FBI Director-nominee Kash Patel’s account of events that was recently challenged by The New York Times.

Oil prices rose around 3% on Monday on reports of a near total production stoppage in Libya, adding to earlier gains on concerns that escalating conflict in the Middle East could disrupt regional oil supplies.

Brent crude futures climbed $2.28, or 2.89%, to $81.30 a barrel by 1316 GMT, while U.S. crude futures were at $77.30 a barrel, up $2.47, or 3.3%.

Brent's intra-day high of $81.40 a barrel is the highest the contract has traded in 11 days.

The death toll in Libya’s coastal city of Derna has soared to 11,300 as search efforts continue following a massive flood fed by the breaching of two dams in heavy rains, the Libyan Red Crescent said Thursday

Marie el-Drese, secretary-general of aid group, told The Associated Press by phone that a further 10,100 are reported missing in the Mediterranean city. Health authorities previously had put the death toll in Derna at 5,500.

The floods that ravaged eastern Libya destroyed nearly a quarter of the coastal city of Derna, leaving thousands of people without shelter and bodies “everywhere,” under collapsed buildings and lying in the streets, an aid official said Wednesday as the government raised the death toll to at least 5,300.

More than 5,000 people were killed in Libya after torrential rains caused two dams to burst near the coastal city of Derna, destroying much of the city and carrying entire neighborhoods into the sea, local authorities said on Tuesday.

Libyan authorities scrambled to reach survivors and provide food, water and shelter to tens of thousands of people after a lethal storm that officials say likely killed thousands of people in the North African country’s east.

Bodies shrouded in blankets piled on the sidewalk outside a hospital in the city of Derna in eastern Libya, illustrating how the storm quickly overwhelmed Libya’s infrastructure and state institutions which have been eroded by years of war and political infighting.

The earliest of more than a dozen distress calls came the morning of June 13. On a boat overpacked with migrants, water had run out and the situation was deteriorating.

The sinking of a migrant boat off the coast of Greece may have been the deadliest of modern times.

An undetermined amount of people numbering in the hundreds remained missing and were likely killed when the migrant vessel sank earlier this week. 

"We don’t have all information yet on what has happened but it seems like this is the worst ever tragedy we’ve seen in the Mediterranean," EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson told a press conference in Brussels on Friday.