The events in Ceuta carry an added symbolic charge because they coincided with Throne Day, the anniversary of King Mohammed VI’s accession to the throne 27 years earlier. While the official discourse celebrated the achievements of three decades of rule, thousands of images from Morocco’s northern border, just metres from the royal palace, were documenting young people surging in the opposite direction. Not inwards but outwards. Not in search of the celebration, but in search of a way out, an escape from the party.
The mass migration witnessed by the occupied city of Ceuta, at the far northern tip of Morocco, on July 30 and 31, 2026 was no mere new entry in the record of irregular migration between Morocco and Spain. It looked far more like a social explosion spilling across borders. Within hours, tens of thousands of Moroccans, most of them young people, among them minors and women, surged towards the Spanish enclave, swimming across the sea or passing through the land crossings, in one of the largest movements of mass crossing that Europe’s borders have witnessed within so short a span of time.
The Spanish authorities later estimated the number of those who entered Ceuta during the two days of the crisis at around 72,000 people, before the Spanish government, in an update issued on August 13, raised its estimate to around 80,000, of whom roughly 90 per cent have returned to Morocco, while between seven and nine thousand remain in Ceuta. The government says that around 2,500 of them are minors, including close to 600 girls.
The human toll has likewise become the subject of sharply conflicting figures. While the number announced by the Spanish authorities rose to 72 dead at the beginning of August, then to no fewer than 96 dead in the latest figures reported by Reuters on 12 August, the Moroccan authorities have officially declared only 11 deaths on Moroccan soil, ten by drowning and one following a fall. At earlier stages the Spanish authorities spoke of dozens of bodies in Ceuta’s mortuaries, while Moroccan human rights organisations put the overall death toll on both sides of the border far higher, making the determination of the final number of victims one of the most pressing questions in this tragedy.
In the Spanish account, the operation was not entirely spontaneous. Officials spoke of human trafficking networks exploiting misleading information spread across social media, and of a misreading of a Spanish Supreme Court ruling on procedures for returning migrants who arrive by sea. Spanish analyses went so far as to say that rumours about the border being opened, or about the possibility of remaining in Spain, encouraged thousands of young people to head en masse towards Ceuta.
The official Moroccan account, which emerged only after days of silence, laid the blame principally on the “malicious exploitation of the digital space”, the circulation of misleading information, human trafficking gangs and erroneous interpretations of legal and administrative provisions. The Ministry of the Interior insisted that the events were not the product of circumstantial or spontaneous factors.
Yet what commands attention is not only the difference between the two accounts, but the way the crisis itself was managed.
Two states facing the crisis: debate in Madrid, silence in Rabat
In Spain, Ceuta became a national issue within hours. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez mobilised, together with the interior minister, the defence minister, the minister for youth and children and the city’s officials, while the opposition and the parties of the right and far right entered the fray. A wide political debate opened up over border security, migration, the treatment of minors, the responsibility of the central government and the limits of the policy on returning migrants.
Nor did the debate stop in Spain. It extended to the European Union, where interior ministers held an emergency meeting, while European states called for greater coordination, tighter border surveillance and a crackdown on people smuggling networks. The crisis also became material for Spain’s domestic political battles, especially with the next elections approaching.
By contrast, the Moroccan scene looked radically different. Official silence hung over the event in its first days. Neither the head of government, nor either chamber of parliament, nor the monarchy issued any public position on the scale of the mass migration or the loss of life. Even the official media gave the event nothing like the space its magnitude warranted, until the Ministry of the Interior’s communiqué appeared.
Here a striking political paradox emerges. Thousands of Moroccan citizens were crossing the border in an extraordinary spectacle, while the state, in its political and media persona, appeared to stand outside the event altogether.
More striking still, the Moroccan announcement of the victims came with no disclosure of their identities, no detailed information about their families and no word on the fate of their remains, while the Spanish casualty count remained far higher. And while Moroccan families searched for their missing children and held up their photographs near the border, the state proved unable, or unwilling, to offer the public a comprehensive and convincing account. Even the duty of condolence demanded by Moroccan Islamic tradition was not performed by the state towards the families of the victims, whose bodies still lie neglected in the mortuaries of the occupied city.
Amid this tragedy, the minors may represent the most sensitive dimension. The Spanish authorities registered more than a thousand unaccompanied minors in the first days, with later estimates reaching around 2,500. Because of the Spanish legal system, they cannot be treated in the same way as adults, which left the reception centres in Ceuta exceeding their capacity many tens of times over.
International and Spanish organisations spoke of children who found themselves separated from their families, of minors sleeping in the streets or in the open, and of the difficulty of establishing the identities of some and the fate of others. At the same time, the Spanish authorities came under criticism over reception conditions and over the return operations, while human rights organisations accused the Moroccan authorities of using force to prevent crossing attempts.
And so the minor found himself at the heart of a crisis manufactured by migration policies on both shores of the Mediterranean. One state whose economic and social conditions drive him to the border to leave, and another that receives him as an irregular migrant yet is legally bound to protect him because he is a child.
From “Who Organised the Operation?” to “Why Did They Flee?”
At the start of this crisis, the question dominating the debate was: who organised this migration, and how? Soon, however, the debate moved beyond the question of how the mass migration happened to a political one: why did they flee? Hypotheses emerged linking the crisis to Moroccan-Spanish relations, to the Spanish-Algerian rapprochement, to the disputes over the Sahara, to Spain’s domestic political situation, and even to the Sánchez government’s positions on the war of extermination in Gaza and the aggressive American war on Iran. Some readings went as far as to speak of migration possibly being used as a geopolitical weapon or as a means of exerting pressure on Madrid.
Yet these hypotheses, however arresting they may seem, must not be turned into facts without evidence. To date, there is no credible public evidence that Israel, the United States or Morocco planned or directed the operation. Press reports and investigations have focused far more on the influence of social media, rumours, trafficking networks and the misreading and misinterpretation of Spanish legal decisions, while acknowledging at the same time that social and economic factors created the environment that left thousands of young people ready to believe those rumours.
The debate then shifted to the question of sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla, when statements by Moroccan officials on the Moroccan identity of the two cities brought the issue back to the fore, and Madrid responded by refusing any discussion of its sovereignty over them. In the capacity of Moroccan-Spanish relations to ignite over these occupied enclaves, this trajectory recalls the Leila Island crisis of 2002.
But turning a humanitarian crisis into a mere geopolitical battle may, in the end, be a way of fleeing the most difficult question.
Migration as a mirror to Moroccan society
The most important question remains not only who set these young people in motion, but why they were prepared to migrate in the first place. Mass migration towards the occupied enclaves in northern Morocco is not an isolated event. It was preceded by earlier waves, most notably the mass crossings of 2021 and 2024, and by other smaller attempts in recent years. Since the 1990s, attempts to reach the European shore from Morocco have never ceased. To measure the sharp rise in migration in recent years, it must be compared with the low rates recorded when the phenomenon receded markedly at the start of the reign of King Mohammed VI, who gave young people hope to have confidence in their country. But as years of failed public policies followed, the phenomenon gradually returned to the fore until it reached its greatest manifestation in the recent events of Ceuta.
Today, several factors intertwine to feed this phenomenon: high unemployment, especially among young people and women, widespread social precarity, the rising cost of living, weak prospects of social mobility, declining trust in institutions, corruption spreading through every sector of the state, the erosion of rights and freedoms, the tightening of the security grip, and the pull of the images arriving from Europe through social media.
Migration must be understood here as a social indicator, not merely a security problem. When a young man or woman at the threshold of life is prepared to leap into the sea knowing they may die, the security response alone can neither explain the phenomenon nor eradicate it.
An image that distills 30 years
From here, the events of 30 July 2026 acquire an added symbolism, coinciding as they did with Throne Day, the anniversary of King Mohammed VI’s accession to the throne 27 years earlier. While the official discourse celebrated the achievements of three decades of rule, thousands of images from Morocco’s northern border, just metres from the royal palace, documented young people surging in the opposite direction. Not inwards but outwards. Not in search of the celebration, but in search of a way out, an escape from the party.
This image may be harsher than any opinion poll, because it measures not what citizens say but what they are prepared to do. It does not mean, of course, that tens of thousands represent the whole of Morocco, or that everyone rejects the state or the regime. But it reveals the existence of a wide segment, above all among the young, that has come to see in the outside world a chance at life, and in their own country a space with no horizon.
Over the past decades, Morocco has invested in roads, ports, airports, stadiums and major industries, achievements that cannot be denied. But development is not measured only by what is built in cement and steel. It is measured also by the opportunities the economy generates, the hope the state offers, and the citizen’s sense of dignity and capacity to trust in his own future.
From here, the popular Moroccan saying “not even a cat flees the wedding house” reads as more than a metaphor in this case. If Throne Day is presented as “the great Moroccan wedding”, then thousands of young people chose, on that very day, to flee this “wedding”. The paradox is not merely that they fled, but that they did so before the eyes of the state, on the day it celebrated its achievements.
The most important lesson of the Ceuta crisis therefore lies not in the number of those who crossed, nor the number of those who returned, nor even the number of bodies recovered from the sea and of those lost forever. The real lesson is that a country can prevent migration by force, but it cannot prevent the desire to migrate by force. Unless the debate shifts from the question “who is behind the migration?” to the question “what drives young people to risk their lives?”, the crisis will remain liable to repeat itself. The destination may be Ceuta today, the sea tomorrow, or some other means that cannot yet be predicted the day after.
Mass migration is not the disease but one of its symptoms. The disease, at its core, is a crisis of trust, of horizon and of social justice. Without treating this deeper condition, the sea will remain, for thousands of young people, less terrifying than the future that awaits them in their own country.
Ali Anouzla is an independent Moroccan journalist.
