Between Wednesday evening and Friday morning last week, an estimated 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Most swam. Many used inner tubes, wetsuits, or improvised flotation devices, their mobile phones sealed in waterproof pouches. Some pushed through the border fence where it enters the water. When they reached the shore, many of them cheered, kissed the ground, and called out for Spain.
Seventy-two of them did not make it. Some drowned. Others died in a stampede at a breakwater barrier as the crowd surged. Morocco’s interior ministry put the figure at eleven. Spain’s government delegate to Ceuta, Miguel Ángel Pérez Triano, said seventy-two. Five more bodies were still being found along the coastline on Sunday morning, days after the surge began.
More than 1,000 people were treated by health services during the crossing period. Ceuta’s annual fair, running from August 1 to 8, was partially suspended. Most shops closed. Unaccompanied minors were found sleeping on pavements and in a disused industrial park.
By Saturday night, 90 percent of those who had entered had returned to Morocco on foot. Several, when asked about their intentions, simply rotated their wrists — the gesture meaning: we will try again. By Sunday, Spanish authorities put the number who had voluntarily returned at 69,500. Between 3,000 and 5,000 remain in Ceuta.
Spain’s Interior Ministry says the total number who entered was 72,000, of whom 70,000 have now returned. The migrants were predominantly young men. Many arrived with their phones zipped into waterproof pouches. Among those who reached the shore was Aziz Dabch, 41, a Moroccan man who remained in Ceuta with a group of minors. “All the children here want to go to mainland Spain,” he said.
Karima Abenaz, a French national with family in Morocco, watched from Ceuta. “It pains me deeply that young people are dying at sea,” she said. “In Morocco, there’s food, there’s everything we need. If we don’t have a decent job, we should go on strike and demand our rights from the government. We shouldn’t be dying at sea.”
Mohamad Abdelkader Driss, 44, a waiter at a fried fish restaurant in Ceuta, watched the surge from his town. “It’s not the young men’s fault,” he said. “If you open the border, of course everyone comes in, but the young men aren’t to blame. The authorities are responsible.”
The European Commission convened an emergency meeting of interior ministers. Commissioner Brunner said at a subsequent press conference in Brussels that between 3,000 and 5,000 migrants remained in Ceuta and that it was now Spain’s responsibility to ensure they did not cross into the Schengen area. “For the time being, Europe, I think, has definitely passed this test. People did not manage to enter the Schengen area, and security at the border was resolved quickly.” Commission President von der Leyen described the images from Ceuta as “unacceptable” and appointed two commissioners to oversee the response. The National
Italy closed its air and sea borders with Spain for the month of August. Prime Minister Meloni called it “an extraordinary measure” taken to safeguard national security. Interior Minister Piantedosi said the controls would remain through August. Twenty-two EU member states signed a joint letter calling for stronger external border measures and pointing to Spain’s recent mass legalisation of undocumented migrants — in which more than one million people submitted applications — as a contributing factor to the crisis. Prime Minister Sánchez flew to Ceuta on Saturday, was met by protesters calling for his resignation, and responded to his European counterparts on social media by writing that “solidarity and empathy are optional.” The Hill
Analysts told the New York Times that while the precise trigger for the surge remained unclear, Moroccan authorities may have been responding to Spain’s recent diplomatic overtures to Algeria — Morocco’s regional rival, which backs the Polisario Front’s claim to Western Sahara. Spanish officials denied that improved relations with Algiers had damaged ties with Rabat. Morocco’s government said its forces had not encouraged the crossing. Some migrants who returned described a border that had been effectively open, with authorities watching as thousands passed.
Spain installed a 500-metre floating barrier along Ceuta’s coastline during the weekend. Moroccan border controls subsequently tightened. The enclave returned to partial normality. Shops reopened.
The 2021 incident at this same border involved between six and nine thousand people and two deaths. It lasted several days before Moroccan border controls were restored, following quiet diplomatic movement on the Western Sahara question. This time the numbers were an order of magnitude larger and the deaths were seventy-two. The mechanism was the same.
People have always moved toward better lives — across straits, across deserts, across mountain passes, by whatever means were available to them. The ones who make it become part of the story of the place they arrived in. The ones who don’t are counted, if they are counted at all, in official death tolls that governments contest and that drop from the news cycle within days. What changes, generation by generation, is not the movement itself but the distance between the world people are leaving and the world they are trying to reach. That distance, measured in wages, in services, in the futures available to a twenty-year-old, has been growing for decades. The fences have grown with it, and so have the numbers willing to test them.
Sixty thousand people entered Ceuta in forty-eight hours. Sixty-nine thousand five hundred walked back. Seventy-two did not walk anywhere again. The enclave’s annual fair resumed. The floating barrier sits in the water. Several young men, when asked if they would try again, rotated their wrists.
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