Inside the coffins were just a few of the 800 who died last Sunday in yet another refugee tragedy, a horrific mass drowning that, in the words of one rescuer, left the sea "a carpet of bodies".

Their names unknown, their families unknowing, the men will lie in a common grave in Malta's Addolorata cemetery. The service was led by the Bishop of Gozo, Mario Grech​.

"We mourn them because deep inside, irrespective of our creed, nationality, race, we know that they are our fellow human beings," he said.

"We can continue to read out the laws like lawyers do, but that is not enough. The way of the law, the way of justice should open itself to the way of love."

Hours later, the leaders of Europe were arguing over exactly how much love they could spare.

They met in Brussels in response to a nightmare week in the Mediterranean, political will reawakened by the deaths, consciences pricked by the suspicion that their decision last year to scale back search and rescue operations - on the theory it would deter potential migrants - may have been a terrible mistake.

British Prime Minister David Cameron pledged his biggest warship, HMS Bulwark, to a beefed-up new search-and-rescue effort – but only under "the right conditions".

"The right conditions [are that] the people we pick up are taken to nearest safe country - most likely Italy - and don't have immediate recourse to claim asylum in the UK," he said.

It seems the way of love must take a detour down the shady avenue of political pragmatism, especially for a PM on the election trail, desperately fighting off the right-wing, anti-immigration UKIP.

More than 21,000 boat-born migrants reached Italy's shores this year, with another 13,000 crossing the sea to the east and 1800 entering Spain.

But more than 1750 have died in the attempt so far in 2015, compared with 2447 in all of 2014 in the central Mediterranean.

And still they come. The week before the Malta tragedy another 500 died in separate accidents. The day after, Italy rescued 638 more migrants on six boats including a tiny inflatable life raft.

Italian prosecutor Maurizio Scalia has estimated up to a million migrants are ready to leave from the Libyan coast. Even the lowest estimates run into hundreds of thousands.

Around a quarter have fled Syria's civil war. Many more have fled Eritrea and its harsh, compulsory military service. Others have come from poverty-stricken sub-Sahara, escaping conflict or just hoping for a better life and income.

Hundreds set off every day. Last year they tended to wait for good weather, those days when the Mediterranean south of Sicily is a bathtub, the playground of leaping dolphins and chugging fishing boats.

Now they risk heavy seas, even storms to escape the lawless violence of Libya, where there are mass executions of migrants, where they are temporarily housed in old jails, jealously guarding the $US1000 it costs to buy passage from the traffickers.

"Usually winter has been a so-called low season because of the rough seas but this winter we have seen rubber dinghies leaving in February and tragic incidents have happened because of that," said Ewa Moncure, spokeswoman for Europe's Frontex​ border control operation in the Mediterranean.

Many have already paid $4000-$5000 for the journey across the desert to Libya in the hot, airless back of a van. Now they are crammed into flimsy dinghies, some forced at gunpoint if they decide at the last moment they don't want to risk it. Others set off in apparently seaworthy boats, but are then forced onto leaking, listing vessels mid-ocean, as the traffickers return for the next load. They are given a satellite phone and the number for Italy's coastguard.

"As soon as these boats are spotted there is no discussion, the search and rescue is declared because they are very dangerous, people's lives are in danger," Moncure said. "These boats are always overcrowded and always quite unsafe."

Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi​, in an emotional op-ed for the New York Times, wrote that the "cradle of our civilisation is becoming a deathbed".

"Twenty years ago we closed our eyes, along with Europe, when faced with Srebrenica," Renzi said, referring to the Bosnian war massacre. "We cannot close our eyes again."

One of the easiest decisions of Thursday's meeting was to triple the size of the search and rescue mission in the Mediterranean.

In 2014, Italy's Mare Nostrum was replaced by Operation Triton, run by Frontex.

It was a third the size and purposely limited in scope. Though it assisted in search and rescue, patrols hugged Italy's shores – it was explicitly a border control operation.

Back then, British Foreign Office minister  Baroness Anelay​ told the House of Lords: "We do not support planned search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean … we believe they create an unintended 'pull factor' encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing."

Refugee Council chief executive Maurice Wren predicted, "the only outcome of withdrawing help will be to witness more people needlessly and shamefully dying on Europe's doorstep".

Now, his warning appears to have come true. "The cut [to search and rescue operations] was a death sentence for children," said Save the Children's Gemma Parkin.

On Thursday, European Council president Donald Tusk pointed out that "the recent tragedy is not because of the lack of rescuing action – the tragedy happened during rescuing action".

But the boost to Frontex suggested that, privately, the leaders knew they should have been doing more. On Thursday Mr Cameron said "our immediate priority is to save lives. Saving lives means rescuing these poor people but it also means smashing the gangs and stabilising the region."

An EU official told Fairfax that a "leitmotif" of the discussions was to destroy the traffickers' business model. They would borrow some tactics from anti-terror operations, clamping down on the websites and social media networks where traffickers sell their services. They would help Libya's neighbours secure their borders. And they would also borrow anti-piracy strategies.

In May 2012, in the early hours of the morning, a helicopter gunship took off from an American warship off the coast of Somalia and swooped towards a camp of suspected pirates. Its weapons destroyed several speedboats, some fuel and some fishing nets, according to local reports (it also terrified the locals, who worried that "Westerners can't clarify who is the pirate and who is the civilian").

Operation Atalanta​ is an EU naval campaign launched in 2008, recently extended to the end of 2016, in which member states send warships to intercept pirates off the Somalian coast to patrol and guard aid supply ships – and occasionally attack pirate camps.

According to the operation's own figures, it has been dramatically successful. In 2011 there were 176 pirate attacks. But there were only 35 the following year, seven in 2013 and just two in all of 2014 (though the figures do not include incidents involving smaller pirate boats).

"The pirate business model is fractured – but not broken," a spokesperson for Operation Atalanta said.

Many in Europe believe this kind of action could work in Northern Africa as well. "We know where the boats are, where the smugglers gather together the people who are fleeing," Italy's defence minister Roberta Pinotti told Italy's Sky TG24.

It's not so much a "turn back the boats" as a "sink the boats" policy. When coastguards rescue migrants, they currently leave their boats adrift. The traffickers simply go out and tow them back to shore, ready for the next load.

However, a former head of operations for Atalanta, Gerry Northwood, told the BBC that destroying boats had "limited value" because they were cheap and easily replaced.

"You're a fool if you think that if you destroy one boat on a Libyan beach you have solved the problem," Paolo Magri, executive vice-president of the Institute for the Study of International Politics in Milan, told the Financial Times. "This is an international criminal organisation and they will send a new one from Egypt. After all a new boat costs €100,000 but each voyage earns up to €800,000 for the traffickers."

There are also concerns that, if the EU started attacking the Libyan coast, it could set a match to tribal conflicts and trash efforts to end the country's civil war.

A people-smuggling kingpin told the Guardian that any attempt to put warships in Libyan waters would be considered "an invasion".

But the last part of the proposed solution to the migrant crisis is the hardest – what to do with the legal refugees, who make up around half of those who arrive.

Most EU member countries don't want to increase their immigrant intake, and the EU can't make them. Currently, just seven countries take more than three-quarters of Europe's asylum applications. Meanwhile, the Italians are sick of taking the brunt of the refugees.

"We take them all to Italy - it is the only option," said Frontex's Moncure. "Migrants have to have a chance to be processed properly, and if there are asylum seekers among them they have to be able to ask for asylum."

In Sicily, where ships land almost every day to discharge their latest rescue mission, lines of white-suited officials give the new arrivals water, food, shoes and a medical check-up. The would-be refugees are then taken to overflowing migration centres for assessment of their claims.

They are not locked up. They often scarper, boarding trains to the mainland, disappearing into the continent. Italy's talkback radio has become poisonous. All day, every day this is the only topic – in a country struggling economically, they are also paying for food, accommodation, healthcare and support for a rush of unwanted visitors. It has triggered a rash of xenophobia. Callers to radio shows say the newcomers are bringing a new risk of terrorism and unrest. And there is plenty of anger against the rest of Europe, who are perceived to have washed their hands of a shared responsibility.

The politicians are worried. It is the kind of atmosphere that topples a government, even a well-meaning, formerly popular one. There is institutional generosity, but thinning patience.

In Brussels, the code for this discussion was "EU solidarity". But crunch time comes next month, when the European commission unveils a new blueprint for sharing the load. It is based on an idea of enforced refugee quotas for countries.

The sad truth is, no matter how many die in the Mediterranean between now and then, few in Europe want to travel Bishop Grech's "way of love".