The main underlying issue is “control over the Strait of Gibraltar,” since at the present time the straits around the world “are part of the critical chain of a world at war”.
Almost a month after the migrant invasion of Ceuta, tensions continues to simmer in the Western Mediterranean. During the early hours of Wednesday morning 12 Moroccans were arrested for stoning a small group of Spanish soldiers. According to a report in 20 Minutos, the events occurred at around 5:30 a.m., when the Spanish troops were on their way to a surveillance point established in the Benzú area:
Upon arriving at the scene, several individuals came out from different points and surrounded the jeep in which the soldiers were riding. The same sources have indicated that the group began to throw stones at the car, causing considerable damage.
Faced with the intensity of the attack, the four soldiers abandoned the vehicle and fled on foot to safety. During the chase, which continued in the direction of Calamocarro, the troops continued to be pelted by stones and suffered injuries and contusions. The military managed to alert the emergency services, and a unit of National Police officers and Civil Guards were called out.
The incident invites a number of questions.
Were the Moroccan stone throwers simply aggrieved migrants who took advantage of the moment, or were they agents of Rabat performing another escalatory move in Morocco’s hybrid war against Spain? Could the Spanish soldiers have responded differently? If, say, they had responded with gunfire against the stone throwers, a la IDF, what would have come of it? My guess is nada bueno.
The attack came hours after hundreds of Ceuta residents attacked migrants who have been camping on the beach of El Trampolín for the past 26 days. Since the migrant invasion of Ceuta during the last days of July, an estimated 6,000 of the roughly 70,000 migrants who made the incursion have stayed behind. Many of them are minors or from third countries in Africa.
As La Voz de Galicia reports, the mood on the streets of Ceuta is quickly souring as a growing cohort of the Spanish enclave’s civil society is losing calm and patience:
A column of 200 of these demonstrators, according to calculations by the National Police, tried to reach the Trampolín beach to mete out their own form of punishments. But they were warded off by warning shots from security forces.
As Brussels Signal notes, Ceuta’s government has asked Madrid to remove the camp on El Trampolín. Spain’s far right-wing party, Vox, arguably the biggest political beneficiary of the Ceuta border crisis, has also demanded the same.
Officers moved more than 1,200 people off the beach on August 20 to clean it. Hundreds returned within hours and the settlement was rebuilt.
Force has now been used at the site on consecutive days. On August 25 police charged and fired rubber bullets to disperse migrants during a Red Cross food distribution.
The march that preceded the beach confrontation drew more than 2,000 people. It began in the O’Donnell district, outside the military hospital, and grew as it moved on the Government Delegation, where the state’s crisis committee was meeting inside.
Demonstrators carried Spanish and Ceuta flags and called for the removal of the migrants and the resignation of the government delegate, Miguel Ángel Pérez Triano. It was the second such protest in two days in a city of about 84,000 people.
In the past 24 hours, dozens of demonstrators broke the police cordon and destroyed the camp on La Trampolín beach, burning it to the ground. They have also tried to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching the migrant camp.
One can’t help but wonder how many of these demonstrators are agitators brought in from other parts of Spain to stir things up. This is, after all, how hybrid war works. There are unsubstantiated reports that the perpetrators include legionnaire paramilitaries and neo-Nazi football hooligans. That is not to take away all agency from the residents of Ceuta, who are understandably shocked and angered by what has happened to their city over the past month.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez government, meanwhile, is still struggling to get to grips with the crisis. It argues that the situation is being handled correctly, since the vast majority of the people who entered in July have already left. The government also insists that any return of migrants must be carried out within established legal procedures, rejecting the opposition’s requests for mass and immediate returns.
The case has also been made for relieving some of the pressure on Ceuta by moving some of the 6,000 remaining migrants to other parts of Spain. Under pressure from both the EU and Spain’s right-wing opposition, the Sánchez government has also approved modifications to the Asylum and Foreigners laws aimed at speeding up expulsions of undocumented migrants.
This latest move has raised concerns among NGOs. The Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR) has cautioned that the reforms are not only “regressive” but are “in line with the countries with the most restrictive [immigration] policies in the EU” and are even “tougher than those required” by the European Pact on Migration and Asylum.
Rabat Not (Apparently) to Blame
There is still no clear political consensus on what actually caused roughly 70,000 migrants to cross over into Ceuta in little over 24 hours. The only thing that the government and opposition parties appear to agree on is that the Kingdom of Morocco bears no responsibility for what happened. This diverges sharply from many others’ reading of the events, including our own.
As we noted in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the Kingdom of Morocco has a history of using migration within so-called “hybrid operations” as a tool of pressure against Spain. We also noted that the Kingdom could be working in tandem with two very powerful allies, the United States and Israel, both of whom had been marking murmurings about supporting Morocco’s territorial claims over Ceuta in the months leading up to July 30th:
While there is, for the moment, no smoking gun, both countries have motives aplenty for attacking Spain. The Sánchez administration is one of the only European governments to have strongly opposed and condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza, with full public support.
Sanchez has also pursued a policy of closer ties and economic cooperation with China, which also runs counter to general EU policy. Perhaps most importantly, Sánchez refused to let the US military use its joint bases in Spain to wage war against Iran.
As we have mentioned before, this is primarily a matter of political survival for Sánchez. Elections are coming next year and as the corruption scandals involving senior figures in his party, including family members, have multiplied, he has decided, quite astutely, that his best form of defence is to pursue policies that are broadly popular with voters.
But in the process, he’s made two very powerful enemies in the US and Israel’s Trump and Netanyahu governments. As Juan David Rojas writes for Unheard, “MAGA has branded Spain Public Enemy No. 1 over its government’s strident posture towards the US and Israel during the Iran war.”
Washington already began shifting its policy stance toward Spain’s two enclaves on the African mainland, Ceuta and Melilla, months ago, with a view to facilitating Morocco’s long-standing territorial claims.
Meanwhile in China, which has close economic ties with both Spain and Morocco, a thesis is “graining ground in some academic and intelligence circles” that Israel’s Mossad played a leading role in instigating the migrant invasion, reports El Mundo America:
What if the massive arrival of migrants in Ceuta is part of an Intelligence operation driven by Morocco and Israel to destabilize Spain? This is the theory gaining ground in some academic and Chinese Intelligence circles. Beijing officials have shared with this newspaper their perspective on how the second world power has viewed the migration crisis in the Spanish autonomous city.
This week, Egyptian political scientist Nadia Helmy, an expert in Chinese politics and Sino-Israeli relations, openly presented this thesis in an article published by Modern Diplomacy, an international magazine specialising in geopolitical analysis. The author argues that some reports from Beijing interpret the events in Ceuta as a hybrid warfare operation aimed at increasing pressure on Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government. According to this interpretation, the maneuver would have involved Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence service, interested in promoting a destabilization campaign against Spain…
“Chinese Intelligence analysis centers have examined the escalation of diplomatic and political tensions between Spain and Israel. From that perspective, the deterioration of bilateral relations could have motivated Mossad to get involved in the migration crisis between Morocco and Spain, exacerbating the situation and infiltrating agents to foster discontent and chaos among the Moroccan population,” Helmy explains.
Morocco’s Secret Services Suffer Massive Data Breach
In recent days, hacktivist group JBT2026 (Jabaroot) claims to have breached Moroccan intelligence and has leaked records of approximately 70,000 Moroccan intelligence and security personnel, including names, dates of birth, national identity card (CIN) numbers, recruitment years, ranks, PPR personnel numbers, and bank account details (RIB). The group says it published the list as a gift to Spanish authorities after the recent migration crisis.
El Mundo describes the hack as the “largest documented breach against Morocco’s security services since their foundation, and arguably the biggest counterintelligence blow suffered by a North African service in Europe in recent decades”.
“Jabaroot’s great gift to Europe, and especially to Spain,” states one of the messages that accompany the leak. The hactivists claim the leak exposes “70,000 agents of Moroccan intelligence and security services, who travelled around Europe carrying out the dirtiest intelligence missions, such as espionage, installation of listening devices and bribery of politicians and businessmen”.
Jabaroot fingers Abdellatif Hammouchi, a senior official of the DGDT (internal intelligence) and the DGSN (the police), and Fouad Ali el Himma, the main royal advisor, as the two main culprits behind the July 30 migrant invasion.
“They are the ones who have planned the attack to put Spain in a difficult situation. Everything happened with the knowledge of a large country and another fictitious state,” the hackers explain, referring to the US and Israel.
Jabaroot does not intend to stop there and has promised to publish another list with the specific names of those who “orchestrated and coordinated the Ceuta plan”. The hacktivists claim to have copies of the orders issued to “the agents who travelled to Fnideq (Castillejos) before and during the events.”
Why Blame Rabat When You Can Blame Moscow?
The Sánchez government begs to differ. In their view, the invasion was the result of “foreign interference” via social media aimed at dividing the European Union — but not from Rabat, Tel Aviv or Washington. Internal reports, according to various government sources cited by El Español, insist there is no indication of hostile action by Rabat towards Spain:
“There are no indications that it was a hybrid attack related to its claim to Ceuta and Melilla, but there are indications about the use of social networks to divide and destabilise the EU by stirring up anti-immigration sentiment,” say government sources.
That is why they add that there has not been a single public reproach or insinuation by any member of the Spanish government towards Morocco.
They explain that a similar incident occurred in 2021, although smaller in number of people involved, but with differences related to Morocco’s performance.
Then there was a “communication breakdown” between Madrid and Rabat as soon as the incident began, while now that relationship was maintained intensely with collaboration between the two governments, always according to sources in the Spanish government.
Guess who’s the prime suspect for all the social media activity, according to El Español:
In those days there were messages on social media in other countries about this intense activity. For example, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X that “We have detected an intense Russian propaganda campaign across Europe that uses images of Ceuta to sow destabilization.”
The tweet in question…
For its part, Spain’s two main opposition parties, the People’s Party (PP) and Vox, place all the blame for the Ceuta border crisis on the Pedro Sánchez government while of course downplaying any possible role played by Rabat, Washington or Tel Aviv…
Nick Corbishley 