An overcrowded boat carrying 305 migrants sank between Djibouti and Yemen on the night of October 8–9. At least 139 dead, 84 missing — one of the worst wrecks ever on the Eastern Route.
Published 12 October 2026 · 18:00 GMT
At least 139 migrants, including 15 children, drowned and 84 remain missing after an overcrowded boat carrying 305 people sank off Djibouti on its way to Yemen during the night of October 8–9, the International Organization for Migration said on Sunday. The vessel went down near Guehere, north of the port town of Obock, shortly after departing for the Bab el-Mandeb crossing. Eighty-two people survived — all of them Ethiopian nationals. Survivors told aid workers the boat began sinking backwards almost as soon as they boarded. The toll, revised upward from 109 after 30 more bodies were recovered, makes the wreck one of the deadliest ever recorded on the Eastern Route, the corridor linking the Horn of Africa to the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf states.
At least 139 migrants, including 15 children, drowned when an overcrowded wooden boat sank off the coast of Djibouti during the night of October 8–9, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Sunday. The vessel was carrying 305 people toward Yemen when it went down near Guehere, north of the port town of Obock. Another 84 people remain missing, and 82 were pulled from the water alive — every survivor an Ethiopian national. Survivors told IOM workers that the boat started to sink backwards almost as soon as they boarded.
No one gets into a boat like that unless they believe there is no other safe way. We cannot keep treating these deaths as normal. — Amy Pope, IOM Director General
The shipwreck happened close to shore, shortly after the boat set out into the darkness of the Bab el-Mandeb strait. Bodies washed up along the coastline through the weekend, and Djiboutian authorities — joined by IOM teams — kept search and recovery operations running as the official toll climbed. Alexandre Coissac, the IOM's chief of mission in Djibouti, said local authorities did their best but were overwhelmed by the sheer number of bodies arriving at once. The agency described the disaster as one of the deadliest ever recorded on the Eastern Route.
The numbers moved fast. IOM's first statement reported 109 dead and 116 missing. By Sunday the toll stood at 139 dead and 84 missing, after 30 more bodies were recovered from the water and the shoreline. The revision was not a contradiction but a grim arithmetic: recovery teams kept finding the dead, and some who were first counted among the missing were found among them.
Even the new figure is provisional. The official count of 139 covers only bodies buried by Djiboutian authorities. Other victims were buried directly by the migrants themselves, in unmarked graves along the shore, and Coissac told the Associated Press those will not enter the official tally until authorities can verify them. “What is terrible is that they were buried with no names, in a common grave, like in a war situation,” he said. “They all have a mother, a father, and we may never learn what happened.” Of the first 109 bodies recovered, 52 were men, 42 were women and 15 were children — nine girls and six boys.
The manifest of the dead is not written in documents — it is written in absence. Everyone rescued was Ethiopian, and IOM says most of the 305 aboard were Ethiopian nationals. Coissac said he spoke with a survivor from Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, where renewed fighting between rebel forces and the federal government has deepened insecurity since last month — the largest escalation of violence there since the 2020–2022 war. For many on the boat, the crossing was not a first attempt: IOM says 150 of those aboard had previously been turned back from Yemen and chose to try again.
What pushes them is not a mystery. IOM points to poverty, insecurity and the mounting effects of climate change — drought, failed harvests, livestock losses — layered over conflict. The Horn of Africa's migrants are overwhelmingly young; Ethiopia's population is one of the youngest in the world, and its labor market absorbs only a fraction of each year's new workers. For a young Ethiopian from a drought-hit region, the wage gap between home and the Gulf states is not a statistic. It is the difference between a family fed and a family scattered.
The route they were taking is known to migration officials as the Eastern Route: from Ethiopia through Djibouti, across the roughly 30-kilometer narrows of the Bab el-Mandeb, into Yemen, and then north through a war zone toward Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. It is one of the busiest and most dangerous migration corridors on the planet. IOM's Missing Migrants Project recorded more than 900 deaths and disappearances along the route in 2025, while the number of attempted crossings rose 18 percent. A March 2026 wreck off the same coastline killed nine and left 45 missing — a footnote now, swallowed by this larger catastrophe.
The paradox of the Eastern Route is that the destination side of the strait is itself a battlefield. Yemen is enduring its most serious escalation of fighting between the Saudi-backed government and the Iran-backed Houthis since the 2022 truce, and Yemenis themselves are fleeing the country. Yet the flow has not stopped: IOM recorded more than 20,000 arrivals from Ethiopia into Djibouti since September 10, and its spokesman Kennedy Omondi Okoth told AFP that 178,000 people made the journey between January and October 2026. Migrants who reach Yemen face violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, exploitation and trafficking, the agency says — and still they come.
Djibouti itself is a study in contrasts: a country of barely a million people that hosts foreign military bases from half a dozen powers, guarding one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, while its northern beaches receive the bodies of migrants the world's navies never see. The government in Djibouti City has long cooperated with IOM on rescue and returns, but the coastline is vast, the boats depart in darkness, and the smugglers' logistics adapt faster than any patrol. For Obock — a fishing town turned waiting room — the wreck is not an exception. It is the season's harvest of a trade that never closes.
Nobody boards these boats through a ticket office. The crossings are organized by smuggling networks that treat each departure as a business operation: migrants gather and wait in Obock, fees are collected — often through debts that follow families for years — and wooden boats are loaded far beyond any safe capacity to maximize profit per trip. The departures happen at night to avoid detection. When 150 people on a single boat are repeat customers, turned back once and trying again, the operation reveals itself as a market with demand far more durable than any deterrent.
In Obock, IOM teams are working alongside Djiboutian authorities to care for the living. The agency said it was assisting 64 survivors at its Migrant Response Centre in the coastal town, providing healthcare, psychosocial support, food and shelter. Some survivors already know their relatives died in the wreck; others were given access to phones to call loved ones back home with the news that they are alive. “They're all in a state of shock,” Coissac said after visiting the wreck area on Saturday. “I tried to talk to some of them but it's very difficult.”
IOM Director General Amy Pope put the agency's position bluntly: “No one gets into a boat like that unless they believe there is no other safe way. We cannot keep treating these deaths as normal. Safe and legal pathways save lives. I am asking governments and donors to act before the next boat goes down.” The call is for regular migration channels — visas, labor programs, resettlement — that would let a young Ethiopian reach a Gulf construction site or household job without first risking the strait. Whether governments treat that as policy or poetry will be measured in the next wreck.
Because the record suggests the route will not be closed by grief. The Eastern Route has survived Yemen's war, it has survived mass drownings, and it survives on a simple economic equation: the cost of the crossing is measured in dollars, the cost of staying is measured in lives slowly undone. Until the first number falls or the second is answered — with work, with safety, with a future that does not require a night boat — the strait will keep its grim ledger. This time the entry reads 139 dead, 84 missing, 82 alive. The next entry is unwritten.
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The IOM says the boat was carrying 305 people when it capsized near Guehere, north of Obock, on the night of October 8–9. As of October 12, at least 139 are confirmed dead — including 15 children — and 84 remain missing. About 82 people survived, all of them Ethiopian nationals. The agency warns the toll could still rise, because some victims were buried by migrants themselves and have not yet been officially verified.
The first IOM statement, issued October 11, reported 109 bodies recovered and 116 missing. Recovery teams then found 30 more bodies along the shore and in the water, raising the confirmed dead to 139 and lowering the missing to 84. The count remains provisional: it covers only bodies buried by Djiboutian authorities, and search operations were still continuing on October 12.
Smuggling networks, not ferry companies. Migrants gather in Obock, pay fees — often financed by debts that burden their families for years — and are loaded onto wooden boats far beyond safe capacity to maximize profit per trip. Departures happen at night to avoid detection. IOM says 150 of those aboard this boat had already been turned back from Yemen once, which shows how durable the smugglers' market is.
The Eastern Route runs from the Horn of Africa through Djibouti, across the Bab el-Mandeb strait to Yemen, then north toward Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Migrants — mostly Ethiopians — seek work and escape poverty, conflict and drought. IOM recorded more than 900 deaths on the route in 2025. They keep coming because the wage gap with the Gulf dwarfs every risk, including Yemen's own war.
IOM says it is assisting 64 survivors at its Migrant Response Centre in Obock, alongside Djiboutian authorities — healthcare, psychosocial support, food and shelter. Survivors who swallowed seawater are receiving medical care. Some already know relatives died; others were given phones to tell families back home they are alive. Djiboutian authorities are continuing search-and-rescue operations and arranging burials for the dead.
