Ceuta: Did Israel and US engineer the crisis?

Israel and the US exploited the Ceuta crisis. But did their involvement go further?

Last Thursday and Friday, around 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta, almost doubling its population. Many of them swam. At least 72 died in the attempt.

Almost all have since returned to Morocco. But the episode provoked a major crisis for Spain’s government. Other European countries turned on Madrid, claiming that its migration policy was responsible. Italy’s hard-right government temporarily reintroduced border controls on arrivals from Spain.

The far right across Europe and the wider West was jubilant. Here, they claimed, was proof of their narrative about a migrant invasion of Europe – and of the supposedly inevitable consequences of Spain’s progressive government taking a more humane approach to migration.

The far right seizes the crisis

Spain’s far-right Vox party called the crossings an “invasion”, demanded the complete closure of the border and linked the migrants to sexual violence and stabbings. Vox could be in government next year through a coalition with the hard-right People’s Party.

Donald Trump similarly declared that the crossings “look like an invasion”, before turning the deaths and desperation in Ceuta into a campaign message:

“That same thing’s going to happen to us if the Republicans don’t get elected, except worse.”

The US State Department went further:

“This unacceptable incident is the direct result of the Spanish Government’s deliberate efforts to enable and facilitate mass illegal migration into Europe.

“We are considering actions to defend Americans at home and abroad from this threat and stand ready to assist other European allies considering similar options.”

Vice-President JD Vance posted:

“Thank God @POTUS was elected and our country’s border no longer looks like this.

“These images out of Spain are an unfortunate reminder of the consequences of mass migration and the radical left-wing globalist policies that have enabled the Invasion of the West.”

Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s hard-right Reform UK, declared: “This is battle for the future of our civilisation.”

Other Reform politicians joined in. Suella Braverman claimed: “Make no mistake, these men are on their way to the UK right now.”

This was totally false. Almost all of the migrants have already been returned to Morocco.

Before turning to what actually happened – and to what could suggest possible Israeli and American involvement – it is worth challenging the claim that Spain somehow brought this crisis on itself through its migration policy.

Spain did not cause this crisis

Pedro Sánchez’s government has introduced a regularisation programme under which undocumented migrants can apply for one-year residence and work permits, provided they had lived continuously in Spain for at least five months before 1 January 2026.

The purpose was straightforward: to bring migrant workers out of the shadow economy and into legal employment, where they could pay taxes, exercise basic rights and play a full part in Spanish society.

Unlike so many other European leaders, Sánchez was prepared to tell people the truth. Welcoming migrants, he has previously said, was “an essential step to guarantee the prosperity and sustainability of our welfare state”.

But the regularisation programme had nothing to do with those attempting to enter Ceuta. None of them qualified for it.

Italian politicians and others across Europe claimed that Spain’s policy would unleash a new wave of migration into their own countries. That was simply false. The permits applied only to residence and employment in Spain. They did not grant the right to work elsewhere in Europe.

Nor did reaching Ceuta provide an automatic route to the Spanish mainland. Those crossing the border would still face extensive further legal and physical barriers before they could travel across the Strait of Gibraltar.

The politicians pretending otherwise were not confused. They were cynically exploiting public ignorance about how the system works – and the hostility towards migrants that such ignorance can so easily be used to inflame.

It is true that Spain’s Supreme Court – acting independently of the government – had ruled that people arriving by water could not be subjected to the exceptional “hot return” policy used at land fences.

But it did not prevent Spain from returning migrants. In practice, it offered those crossing into Ceuta no right to remain in Spain. But Spanish intelligence believes that people smugglers did exploit a distorted interpretation of the ruling.

Morocco let it happen

There is very strong evidence that the Moroccan state played a decisive role in this crisis.

Back in May 2021, 8,000 Moroccan migrants entered Ceuta over two days. On that occasion, Morocco had been antagonised by Spain admitting the leader of a pro-independence Western Saharan movement for medical treatment.

Western Sahara is under Moroccan occupation, and there is a powerful movement for independence. As the think tank Chatham House outline:

“Within months, Spain had abandoned its historic position on Western Sahara – supporting an independence referendum – and instead endorsed Morocco’s autonomy plan for the territory. The lesson for Rabat, perhaps, was that pressure on Spain’s enclaves works.”

This time, the supposed pretext may have been Sánchez’s visit to Morocco’s regional rival, Algeria. He was attempting to repair relations that Algeria had severed after Spain shifted towards Morocco’s position on Western Sahara. Sánchez also discussed increasing the gas supply through a pipeline that bypasses Morocco and runs directly from Algeria to Spain.

But this was an extraordinarily weak pretext for enabling such a vast movement of people and endangering so many lives. The meeting had been announced in advance, and it did not reverse Spain’s highly favourable position towards Morocco on Western Sahara.

An Associated Press photographer at the scene said Moroccan gendarmes made no attempt to intervene as thousands of people moved past their positions towards Ceuta.

El País reported the same pattern. Moroccan auxiliary forces managed the movement of the crowd while police and gendarmes stood guard. This non-intervention continued from approximately midday on Thursday until Friday morning. The newspaper described the initial inhibition as “patent”.

In other words, Morocco’s authorities maintained order while leaving the route into Ceuta open.

Only after tens of thousands had crossed did the authorities deploy tear gas, water cannon and physical force. That matters. Once Morocco’s security forces decided to stop the movement, they demonstrated that they were perfectly capable of doing so.

More devastatingly, a report published by El Español cites sources in the Guardia Civil’s general staff who claimed Spanish border-surveillance cameras identified members of Morocco’s intelligence service among those who entered Ceuta.

Those sources claim that the alleged operatives took part to supervise the movement, observe Spain’s deployment, and monitor the response of the Spanish security forces. Spain’s intelligence sources are reported to have corroborated the Guardia Civil’s identification. The paper says other such infiltrations had been detected in previous Ceuta and Melilla crises.

Another report suggests that Spanish intelligence was concerned by nearly a thousand people swimming into Ceuta in a 10-day period. They interpreted the growing pressure as a potential test from the Moroccan state.

Spanish government sources told El País that an entry on this scale would not have been possible without the passivity of Morocco’s security forces.

Spain has continued publicly to praise Morocco as an ally. But Madrid has every reason to avoid an open confrontation: it depends on Morocco for migration control, counter-terrorism cooperation and the management of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla.

Morocco’s alliance with Israel and the US

All of this matters because Morocco is a close ally of both Israel and the United States, with deep economic, military, intelligence and security ties to both countries.

Morocco is one of the Arab and African countries closest to the US. It’s a major non-NATO ally which buys vast quantities of US weapons and host of African Lion, AFRICOM’s largest annual military exercise. Its security services have a strong relationship with US intelligence and law enforcement. It has a free trade agreement which underpins annual goods trade worth $7.4 billion a year.

In 2020, Morocco normalised diplomatic relations with Israel. Israel gained security access and influence in North Africa, while Morocco acquired Israeli weapons and defence technology, along with expanded intelligence and cybersecurity cooperation.

In November 2021, Israel and Morocco signed a defence memorandum establishing a formal framework for intelligence cooperation, military exercises, defence-industrial collaboration, Israeli arms sales and exchanges between the two countries’ security apparatuses.

At a meeting in January, Morocco and Israel signed a joint military work plan for 2026.

None of that proves that Israel or the US was involved in the Ceuta crisis. But it establishes the context in which the crisis took place – and the states with which Morocco’s security establishment is most closely aligned.

The US connection

Donald Trump has been enraged by Spain’s opposition to the illegal war on Iran and to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He recently demanded an end to trade with Spain, calling the country “terrible”.

In February, written testimony from a senior fellow at the neoconservative Hudson Institute to a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee stated:

“Morocco has been using migrants to change Spanish policy, and it has succeeded.”

In March, the right-wing, pro-war commentator and former Pentagon official Michael Rubin openly called on Morocco to organise a mass civilian mobilisation against Ceuta and Melilla.

He proposed that Moroccans gather at the frontier, send bulldozers forward and enter the cities unarmed in order to raise the Moroccan flag. Rubin is a prominent figure in Washington’s pro-Israel and national-security world.

In the weeks that followed, the House Appropriations Committee published its report on the 2027 State Department funding bill. It did two striking things.

First, it directed at least $20 million in National Security Investment Programmes and another $20 million in Foreign Military Financing to Morocco.

Second, it stated that the “Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan territory”, noted Morocco’s claim to the cities and supported State Department efforts to encourage talks over their “future status”.

The House passed the accompanying bill on 15 July by 217 votes to 209 – just 15 days before the mass crossing.

Two days before the crossing, the US Trade and Development Agency agreed to fund a $5.7 million early engineering study for an ammonia project in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara. It was the first US government financing for a private-sector project there.

At the signing ceremony, the US ambassador declared:

“America is in the Moroccan Sahara.”

Trump’s recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara was no longer merely diplomatic. Washington was now attaching concrete rewards to it.

The US first recognised Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara in 2020, in exchange for Morocco normalising relations with Israel. The Trump administration subsequently announced initiatives intended to mobilise $5 billion in investment involving Morocco and the wider region, as well as a weapons package.

That has now increased to at least $40 million for Moroccan security and investment programmes.

Again, none of this proves that the US organised the Ceuta crossings. But the sequence is striking: growing US hostility towards Spain, open encouragement for Morocco to mobilise against the Spanish enclaves, congressional language backing Morocco’s territorial claim, increased military support and the first US financing of a private project in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara.

The Israeli connection

Prominent Israeli figures were certainly jubilant about the crisis.

Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, declared:

“Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy.”

Spain had not, in fact, declared any state of emergency.

Meanwhile, the far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir demanded that Sánchez “open the doors of Spain and grant refuge to the residents of Gaza who seek to emigrate”.

But the most important evidence concerns the online campaign that helped bring tens of thousands of people to the border.

Anonymous social-media accounts circulated a specific message: that the Spanish border was open and that people could enter without documents.

El País found that the anonymous campaign did more than claim the frontier was open. It distributed practical advice intended to help people reach and cross the border, while one of the communities promoting the journey attracted more than 20,000 followers before being closed. The original organisers have proved difficult to trace, and automated accounts may have helped spread their material.

According to El País, the original accounts largely vanished, automated amplification may have been involved and the initial trigger has still not been identified.

After the crisis exploded, the Spanish fact-checking organisation Maldita documented the rapid appearance of posts using the hashtags #FreeCeuta and #FreeMelilla from Israeli and pro-Israeli accounts.

Al Jazeera’s open-source unit conducted a broader analysis. It found dozens of known and anonymous Israel-linked or Israel-supporting accounts using almost identical framing. The same maps, phrases and hashtags appeared repeatedly.

They found that AI-generated scenes were used to exaggerate the disorder in Ceuta. Posts described the crisis as Spain’s punishment for supporting Palestine. Hananya Naftali, a former digital-media official associated with Benjamin Netanyahu, participated in the campaign.

The timing and wording were so closely aligned that the investigators regarded them as strongly suggestive of central coordination.

That does not prove that Israel was behind the original accounts. But it would be extraordinarily naive to pretend that Israel lacks either the means or the record to conduct precisely this sort of operation.

Israel has form

France’s agency for combating foreign digital interference has accused the Israeli company BlackCore of targeting elections in several countries.

These included Scotland, where hundreds of coordinated accounts bombarded John Swinney, the SNP and the Scottish government after their criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Before effectively disappearing from public view after Reuters approached it, BlackCore had publicly promoted its ability to conduct sophisticated influence operations for governments and political campaigns.

Then there is Black Cube, founded by former Israeli intelligence officers and known as the “private Mossad”. It has been accused of using fake identities, bogus job offers, hidden cameras and manufactured corruption allegations against journalists, activists and pro-Palestinian politicians – including in an alleged attempt to destabilise Slovenia’s government immediately before an election.

One of Black Cube’s advisers is Giora Eiland, the former head of Israel’s national security council. Eiland has publicly advocated depriving Gaza’s population of food, water and fuel, and welcomed the spread of epidemics as a means of securing Israeli victory.

In 2023, an undercover investigation exposed another Israeli operation, Team Jorge. The group’s founder boasted to undercover reporters that his organisation had covertly intervened in dozens of elections around the world. Its technology allowed operatives to manufacture and manage elaborate digital identities across numerous platforms, complete with some of the financial and commercial accounts that would make them appear authentic.

Its software controlled thousands of fake online personas, some equipped with email accounts, credit cards, cryptocurrency wallets and carefully fabricated lives.

We also know that Israel’s government financed a covert campaign using fake social-media accounts to target American politicians with pro-Israel propaganda. Israeli Pegasus spyware has been deployed against politicians and dissidents around the world. Israel has also dramatically expanded its official propaganda budget.

So let us be precise. None of this establishes who started the Ceuta campaign.

But the techniques used there – anonymous accounts, detailed operational instructions, automated amplification and the rapid disappearance of the original network – bear an obvious resemblance to methods repeatedly used by Israeli firms and state-backed operations elsewhere.

The question is not whether Israel possesses the machinery to manipulate foreign politics in this way. It unquestionably does.

The question is whether that machinery was deployed here.

A plan to help Morocco “reclaim its north”

There is another striking piece of context.

In April 2026, the Israeli news outlet Ynet published an article headlined: “Abraham Accords reach the Strait: how Israel can help Morocco reclaim its north.”

It was written by a Morocco-based analyst affiliated with the hard-right US-based Middle East Forum, which has previously supported the far-right British figure Tommy Robinson.

The article described developments in Washington as the “architecture of a coordinated strategic repositioning”. It argued that Israel was uniquely placed to help Morocco exploit Spain’s deteriorating relationships with Washington and Jerusalem.

The author proposed three roles for Israel:

• direct diplomatic signalling in support of Morocco’s position;

• lobbying and amplification within Washington;

• repeated attacks on Spain as hypocritical for criticising Israeli territorial policy while retaining Ceuta and Melilla.

He concluded that Israeli support for Morocco’s claim would both impose a political cost on Spain and strengthen a partner with a strategically important position on the Strait of Gibraltar.

Israel has also adopted a strategy of promoting the European far right and its anti-migrant narratives. That includes Vox - the Spanish far-right party which has a militant pro-Israel orientation, and which has links with Netanyahu’s Likud party.

In an interview on Fox News’ Hang Out with Sean Hannity, Netanyahu cited someone who had supposedly been asked:

“Why are you studying Arabic?”

The answer:

“Because I want to be able to go to London and Paris.”

Netanyahu continued:

“If you lose control over your borders, you lose control over your fate and your destiny and your future.”

To be clear, just 0.8 per cent of Londoners use Arabic as their main language, while Arab people make up around 1.6 per cent of the city’s population.

This was Netanyahu scaremongering about a supposed Arab invasion of Europe – the same narrative being used to exploit the Ceuta crisis.

Spanish suspicions

Spanish politicians have themselves voiced suspicions about what happened.

After Danny Danon attacked Spain over Ceuta, the Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente responded:

“Well, things are starting to get pretty clear.”

The implication was obvious: Puente was hinting at Israeli involvement.

Gabriel Rufián, a left-wing Spanish politician, posted:

“The Moroccan dictatorship, in the service of the US and Israel, is once again blackmailing Spain and Europe this summer by turning its own people into disposable cannon fodder.

“Something that, instead of being the subject of partisan politicking, should be the subject of a cross-cutting State pact.”

Spanish experts have raised similar questions.

Pedro Rodríguez, a professor of international relations, said that the crisis occurred because “Morocco wanted it to happen”. He described it as a display of strategic realignment in which Morocco was aligning itself with the United States and Israel while demonstrating Spain’s inability to control its own territory.

And Kenneth Roth - former executive director of Human Rights Watch - posted:

“Why would Israel want its ally Morocco to control Ceuta as opposed to its critic Spain? One reason may be that Ceuta is the closest point in Africa to Europe, sitting astride the Strait of Gibraltar, meaning that Spain currently controls both sides of the strait. The Strait of Gibraltar is only 8 miles across, as opposed to the Strait of Hormuz, which is 21 miles. If Iran can control the Strait of Hormuz, Spain could easily control the Strait of Gibraltar and potentially block Israeli access to the Atlantic.”

What can we conclude?

None of this proves for certain that Israel or the US helped orchestrate the crisis. That caveat matters.

But it would be equally unserious to dismiss the possibility out of hand.

Morocco is a close US and Israeli ally, with deep security and intelligence ties to both states. It has previously facilitated mass crossings into Ceuta to extract political concessions from Spain. On this occasion, its security forces were visibly passive until tens of thousands of people had crossed – and then demonstrated that they were entirely capable of stopping the movement.

Washington had just increased military and economic support for Morocco, financed a project in Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara and endorsed language treating Ceuta and Melilla as territories whose future status should be negotiated.

Senior US and Israeli figures immediately seized on the crisis to attack Spain and promote the idea of an Arab “invasion” of Europe.

Anonymous social-media accounts of unknown origin played a crucial role in mobilising people, providing practical instructions and spreading the claim that the border was open. Many of those accounts then vanished. Israel has an extensive record of state-backed and private influence operations using precisely these methods.

That does not prove the case.

At the very least, Israel, the US and the far-right in general have shamelessly exploited this crisis.

Whether that involvement goes deeper surely demands investigation.