At least 109 migrants, including 15 children, have died and more than 116 are missing after a boat carrying about 305 people capsized while sailing from Djibouti to Yemen, the UN's migration agency said on Sunday.
The boat overturned near Guhere, north of Djibouti's port town of Obock, during the night of October 8 into October 9, the International Organisation for Migration said, citing survivor accounts.
More than 80 people survived the shipwreck, all Ethiopian citizens, the agency said. The Ethiopian government did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
Of the 109 bodies recovered, 52 were men, 42 women and 15 children, the IOM said.
"Our teams are on the ground alongside local authorities to provide emergency assistance," said IOM chief of mission in Djibouti, Alexandre Coissac.
"This tragedy is a stark reminder of the dangers faced by migrants along this migration corridor as they seek economic opportunities," he added.
Djiboutian authorities are continuing search and rescue operations, the IOM said, also providing medical care to survivors and arranging burials.
The tragedy follows renewed fighting in Ethiopia's Tigray region, nearly four years after a peace agreement ended a devastating two-year civil war there. The IOM's Displacement Tracking Matrix shows more than 20,000 incoming movements to Djibouti from Ethiopia since September 10.
Each year, tens of thousands of migrants from the Horn of Africa travel through Djibouti and cross the Bab Al Mandeb strait to Yemen, from where they hope to reach Gulf countries.
The crossings continue despite fighting on Yemen's Red Sea coast between government forces and Iran-backed Houthi rebels since early September.
At the same time, more than 3,700 people fled the fighting and made the crossing from Yemen to Djibouti, according to the IOM.
With reporting from agencies