A WOMAN and two children aged seven and two drowned yesterday after their boat smashed into rocks off the Greek island of Lesbos.

The latest deaths came as the leaders of central and eastern European nations met in Brussels to discuss how to manage the refugee crisis, in which 680,000 desperate fugitives have crossed into Europe by sea so far this year.

The largest numbers are fleeing the Western-fuelled conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan.

Many countries in eastern Europe have threatened to close their borders if yesterday’s conference, summoned by European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, does not come up with a plan to manage the situation.

Hungary has already fenced off its Serbian border with razor-wire, forcing the refugee flow through Croatia instead. Croatian authorities said yesterday that Saturday had been their busiest day yet, with 11,500 people entering the country in one day.

Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said Europe needed a “comprehensive solution.”

Serbia would not “put up any walls,” he said, but he added that if countries to its west closed their frontiers then Serbia would not be able to cope on its own.

The Brussels summit discussed measures to make it harder to cross the Turkey-Greece border.

The EU will offer hundreds of extra border guards and ships to patrol Greek waters — in return for EU border states refusing to allow refugees passage deeper into Europe.

But Human Rights Watch warned at the weekend that shutting people out would risk an even greater humanitarian catastrophe.

“The degrading treatment of fleeing people at Europe’s borders is shameful,” the charity’s eastern Europe and Balkans researcher Lydia Gall said.

“Unless EU member states start working together to address the refugee crisis, people will die at Europe’s borders this winter.”

Last week, she pointed out, 1,400 refugees were stranded for 24 hours when Slovenian authorities refused them access on the grounds that its registration centre at the border point was full.

Denied permission to re-enter Croatia, they were stuck without food or water in freezing conditions with no shelter.

Dozens of similar incidents have been reported.