As of 2025. IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix rounds through 2025 record several hundred thousand migrants present in Libya alongside a much reduced IDP caseload; both figures are revised at each round.
Libya's 2011 uprising and the civil wars that followed produced repeated waves of displacement and a system of detention for migrants and refugees. The clearest single case of forced displacement is Tawergha: its entire civilian population of roughly 48,000, accused collectively of siding with Gaddafi's forces against Misrata, fled in August 2011 and was prevented from returning for years; Human Rights Watch found the town systematically destroyed and looted, described the expulsion as collective punishment that may amount to crimes against humanity, and reported that as of December 2018 only about 100 families had attempted to resettle. Communities were also expelled from Benghazi and Derna by the Libyan Arab Armed Forces from 2014. Human Rights Watch recorded over 125,000 internally displaced people as of August 2024. In parallel, migrants and refugees intercepted at sea by the EU-supported Libyan Coast Guard — 16,466 by September 2024 — are held in facilities controlled by state bodies and armed groups. The UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya concluded in March 2023 that there were reasonable grounds to believe war crimes and crimes against humanity had been committed, including murder, enslavement, torture, rape and sexual slavery, and that migrants had been systematically targeted and tortured.
Armed groups expelled whole communities — most completely the town of Tawergha — during and after the 2011 uprising and the 2014–2020 civil wars, while successive authorities and militias have arbitrarily detained migrants and refugees in a network of centres
World Bank and UN Population Division estimates put Libya at about 6.2 million in 2011. The displacement counted here includes the complete emptying of Tawergha - some 40,000 people expelled in 2011 and unable to return until 2018 - alongside the displacement waves of the 2014-2020 civil wars.
No cumulative death toll for Libya since 2011 has been established, and the available counts are partial and cover different things: Human Rights Watch cites 1,536 people found dead or missing in the central Mediterranean after departing Libya in 2024 alone, while deaths in detention, in the 2011 war and in the 2014–2020 civil wars have never been systematically counted. The UN Fact-Finding Mission documented murder, extrajudicial killing and enforced disappearance without producing totals.
Documented by the UN Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Libya in its March 2023 final report and by Human Rights Watch, which recorded the systematic destruction and looting of Tawergha.
Libya