LAMPEDUSA, Italy — Italian and Maltese maritime authorities recorded more than 9,400 central Mediterranean arrivals in the first ten days of May, a four-year high for the period, as calmer seas and easing spring winds reopened a smuggling corridor that had been throttled for most of the Iran war winter and pushed reception facilities on this small Sicilian island back to triple their official capacity.

The Italian Interior Ministry’s daily migration bulletin, released Monday morning, put the year-to-date arrivals figure at 27,318, up 41 percent from the same point in 2025 and the highest cumulative total since the 2023 spike. Roughly 6,300 of the May arrivals had landed at the Contrada Imbriacola hotspot on Lampedusa, which holds 389 people under its official certification and on Sunday night was sheltering 1,247, according to figures shared by the Italian Red Cross. A further 2,100 disembarked at Pozzallo, Augusta and Roccella Ionica in Calabria, with several hundred more transferred directly to ports on the Sicilian mainland by Italian coast guard cutters operating beyond the territorial limit.

“The window that closed in November has fully reopened, and the smuggling networks were ready for it,” said Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration’s coordination office in Rome. “We are seeing larger fiberglass boats, more departures per night, and crucially we are seeing them push off from a wider arc of the Libyan and Tunisian coastline, which makes interception and rescue much harder for everyone involved.”

Italian coast guard logs reviewed by reporters in Lampedusa showed 38 separate rescue events between Friday and Sunday alone, with vessels intercepted as far south as the Maltese search-and-rescue zone and as far east as the Sicilian Channel approaches off Pantelleria. The Phoenix, a rescue ship operated by the Malta-based MOAS, brought 412 survivors into Trapani on Sunday after coordinating four separate transfers with the Italian-flagged vessel Diciotti. A separate operation by the German NGO Sea-Watch ended in tragedy off the Tunisian coast, where a wooden boat carrying an estimated 90 people from Sfax broke apart in moderate swell before responders could reach it; 31 bodies have been recovered, with at least 50 still missing.

The surge tracks a confluence of factors that humanitarian researchers had warned about since the Doha framework took hold in late April. Sea-state forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts show the central basin running roughly a meter below its winter average wave height for the first half of May, with the next significant Mistral event not expected before the weekend. At the same time, the loosening of Gulf shipping insurance premiums that followed the Iran ceasefire has freed up Libyan-flagged smaller craft for non-fishing use, and the partial collapse of the Tripoli-based Stability Support Apparatus militia in late March has reopened beaches west of the capital that were closed to smugglers for most of last year.

“We expected a rebound but not on this scale this fast,” said Camille Le Coz, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute Europe in Brussels. “The Iran war pulled global media attention away from the Mediterranean for two months, and during that window the Libyan coastal architecture shifted in ways that we are only now beginning to map. Italian and EU operational planning was built around a different threat geometry.”

Demographically, the arrivals are diverging from the patterns of the past two seasons. Italian processing data showed Sudanese nationals accounting for 31 percent of May landings, the largest single share, followed by Bangladeshis at 17 percent, Syrians at 12 percent and Eritreans at 9 percent. The Sudanese figure is consistent with the UN famine declarations in Darfur and Kordofan earlier this month and with overland routing through Chad, Niger and southern Libya that aid groups have been tracking since February. Bangladeshi arrivals — many of them young men carrying receipts from licensed Dhaka recruitment agencies that promised construction work in Libya — reflect what Italian prosecutors in Palermo describe as a coordinated migrant-smuggling pipeline that uses tourist visas and onward bus transport through Egypt.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s office issued a brief statement Monday calling the numbers “unsustainable” and announcing that Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi would travel to Tunis on Tuesday for an emergency bilateral meeting with Tunisian President Kais Saied. The Italian government has been pressing Brussels to advance the next tranche of the 2024 EU-Tunisia migration partnership funding, roughly 105 million euros earmarked for coast guard equipment and border-management training, which had been held back over rule-of-law concerns. European Commission spokesperson Anitta Hipper, in Brussels, declined Monday to confirm whether the disbursement was imminent but said the Commission was “actively engaged” with Italian and Tunisian counterparts.

Reception conditions on Lampedusa have deteriorated sharply over the weekend. Local hospital director Francesco Cascio said the island’s 30-bed Poliambulatorio had treated 184 arrivals between Friday and Monday morning, including 22 cases of moderate to severe dehydration, eight children with respiratory infections and three pregnant women in their final trimester who were airlifted to Palermo. The Lampedusa mayor’s office said it had requested federal authorization to charter a second civilian ferry to begin transfers to mainland facilities Tuesday morning; a request for emergency tent capacity from the Italian Civil Protection Department was still pending Monday afternoon.

Frontex, the EU’s border agency, said its Operation Themis assets — two patrol vessels, a maritime surveillance aircraft and a long-endurance drone operating out of Malta — had been reinforced over the weekend with a Polish offshore patrol vessel and a Greek coast guard aircraft on temporary rotation. Frontex executive director Hans Leijtens, speaking to reporters in Warsaw, said the agency expected arrival pressure to remain elevated “at least through the first significant weather break” and had requested member states accelerate contributions to a 300-officer rapid-deployment pool for southern Italian processing facilities.

UNHCR’s Italy representative, Chiara Cardoletti, said the agency was preparing to invoke its emergency relocation protocols for unaccompanied minors and would press EU interior ministers, who meet in Luxembourg on Thursday, to expedite voluntary transfers under the new Pact on Migration and Asylum. Officials in Rome said the Council meeting agenda was being revised to give the Mediterranean situation its own session.