Two Syrian girls aged 8 months and 5 years were among five bodies recovered off the Libyan coast when a small wooden boat capsized, the Italian Red Cross said on Friday.
The boat originally had 27 people belonging to eight families on board before it overturned, according to the 21 migrants who survived the shipwreck.
The shipwreck survivors were transferred to a rescue vessel run jointly by the Red Cross and the Malta-based Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) who on Thursday alone plucked 400 people to safety.
All the rescued survivors and the casualties were being transported to Sicily.
Reporting the shipwreck and the Syrian girls' deaths, The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano on Friday condemned "the unending massacre in the Mediterranean".
Since the conflict in Syria began in 2011, it is estimated that over 50,000 children have already lost their lives.
"People are dying every day on journeys across the Mediterranean Sea, and everyone knows it," said Italian Red Cross president Francesco Rocca.
"This proves that all the official messages of condolence and the mournful statements coming from the governments after every tragedy are hypocritical, false and pointless," he said.
Rocca and MOAS co-founder Regina Catrambone urged nations to safeguard lives by rapidly ensuring legal migration channels and tackling the scourges driving people to flee their homelands, such as war and hunger.
