The Rumour of Ceuta
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What you saw
An endless column of people descending a bare ridge. Overturned containers, wrecked streets. A teenager telling the camera he will be moving on to Germany in the coming days. Soldiers forming up on a breakwater. An officer throwing a rock.
It is worth looking at these five images one at a time, because they are a small lesson.
The column on the ridge is a religious commemoration on Mount Cudi in the Turkish province of Şırnak, published on 5 July. The wrecked street is in Toulouse and dates from 30 May, when Paris Saint-Germain won the Champions League. The teenager is standing in Casablanca celebrating Morocco’s World Cup win over Canada; the video is from 4 July, and the original caption is about football and about the next opponent, France. The German subtitle was invented — the video is not the forgery, the sentence put into his mouth is.
For the soldiers on the breakwater, the newsroom Newtral concludes after examination that an AI produced them; the most convincing argument there is not the software but a piece of lettering: the uniforms read “Ejército Español” across the back — which the soldiers actually deployed do not have.
And the still of the rock-throwing officer? Precision pays off here, because the case shows how hard image verification has become. Two newsrooms, Newtral and Lead Stories, consider it AI-generated; both rely on the same finding, a digital watermark. Maldita.es found the same watermark and explicitly draws no conclusion: whether an AI generated the image entirely or merely polished a video still cannot be determined. Maldita and Lead Stories found the underlying video from several angles; Newtral found no indication of a forgery but could not establish the location. Only one thing is certainly false: the viral post attributed the image to the Reuters news agency. That was fabricated.
This is not a complete catalogue. The Spanish newsroom Maldita.es now lists 24 entries on this crisis (as of 4 August) — false claims, footage torn from its context, and open cases. Among them a desecrated church that stands in Cali, Colombia, and was wrecked by a 27-year-old local. A dog driving off “immigrants”: Torre Pacheco, three weeks before the crisis — the person who posted it has since clarified that the man being chased is his cousin. Riots “in Melilla” that took place in Nador, on Moroccan territory. A “captured Spanish railway station” that stands in Kenitra; that video is even genuine and from that very night — only from Morocco, where people stormed the trains to Tangier. And anti-Sánchez protests from November 2023.
One detail deserves particular attention. A purported quote from Morocco’s gendarmerie chief circulated once before in 2021, according to Newtral — with identical text, identical photo and identical spelling errors. Five-year-old material, reused unchanged.
And now the other half, which matters just as much: the event itself was not a fake. Snopes could not verify the viral video itself and left it unrated — but pointed to comparable footage from AP, from Reuters and from local media from the same place on the same day. People drowned. Anyone who concludes from the false captions that nothing happened has fallen for the second forgery — and that one is the more comfortable.
What actually happened
On 30 July, Morocco’s Throne Day, people began crossing the border into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta in large numbers — most of them swimming around the breakwaters of Tarajal and Benzú, others over the fence. Ceuta has a good 84,000 inhabitants.
There is still no agreement on the figures. The Spanish interior ministry spoke of 50,000 crossings on the Friday and corrected this to around 72,000 on the Tuesday. The city of Ceuta was consistently higher: first 60,000, then 80,000, most recently 75,000. Morocco concedes 40,000. On the death toll, the government delegation gives 72, most recently 75; the city government counts 88. Morocco confirms eleven further deaths on its own territory, ten of them by drowning — those eleven are not included in the Spanish figures. On 3 August the EFE news agency had to place two death tolls side by side in one and the same dispatch.
I am naming these ranges deliberately rather than settling on a single number — why that matters is at the end of this piece.
What was almost entirely lost: the vast majority have long since returned. Of the roughly 72,000, more than 70,000 were back in Morocco within a few days. Nobody travelled onward to the Spanish mainland or to another member state; that appears in the EU Council’s statement of 4 August — there, however, as what Spain and the Commission have reported. Several thousand remained in Ceuta, among them 862 unaccompanied minors, who are under special protection and may not simply be pushed back — as of 3 August; the city expects more than a thousand and has 29 places in regular capacity. How robust that protection is in the crush became visible a day later: the return of a crying twelve-year-old boy was stopped only when journalists present and bystanders made clear the child was alone — whereupon an officer of the Legión intervened.
How the return came about overall — how many left voluntarily and how many were pushed back — has not been broken down publicly. Spain has a long and contested practice of summary return at its North African exclaves. Strasbourg, of all places, has not contradicted it: in N.D. and N.T. v Spain, a case from Melilla, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights found unanimously in 2020 that there had been no violation of the prohibition of collective expulsion. Criticism from the UN treaty bodies was sharper.
The sentence
At the beginning there was no order, but a rumour. The EFE agency reconstructed how it spread. From late July, messages circulated in Moroccan Facebook and WhatsApp groups, always in the same form: “The door to Ceuta is open for everyone. Share it so everyone finds out.” — “The door to Ceuta is open. Tetouan, let’s go.” — “Today is the day of Ceuta.” A further video, in which someone laments having arrived too late, reached more than 230,000 views. The Moroccan news site Le360 wrote that the mobilisation spread “like wildfire”. The AP news agency summed it up in its headline: runaway online rumours had sparked a frantic rush.
Two doors have to be kept apart here, or the rest makes no sense. One is the border itself — fence and breakwaters. It gave way, otherwise seventy thousand people would not have got through. The other is the door into Europe: into a right to stay, onto the mainland, into travelling on. That was never open, and it is not open today. The rumour meant the first door and promised the second.
Two justifications were supplied afterwards, and neither withstands scrutiny.
The first: Spain had decided on a mass legalisation, so people set off. In fact that scheme applies exclusively to people who were already living irregularly in Spain before 1 January 2026 and can show five months of continuous residence — and the application deadline closed on 30 June, a month before the crisis. Nobody who swam across in late July could benefit from it. That is not a matter of interpretation, it is what the decree says. What this does not mean is that nothing applies to those who arrived. An asylum application remains possible, and unaccompanied minors come under state guardianship.
The second: a ruling by the Supreme Court had banned returns. The ruling exists — it has simply been misread, and in a way that demands honesty from this text: it concerns precisely the group of cases covering most of these crossings. The Tribunal Supremo ruled on 29 June 2026, announced on 8 July, that summary return may not be applied to people trying to reach Ceuta by swimming who are intercepted at sea. They may still be returned — only through the regular procedure, with a formal decision, a lawyer and an interpreter. “A different procedure” became “the border is open” online.
And the sequence the human rights activist Achraf Maimouni described to AP is telling: first people heard that the border was open — and then everyone started citing the court decision. The legal justification did not come before the movement. It came afterwards, as a rationale.
Who put the rumour into the world is unknown to this day. AP writes that several of the accounts involved were deleted soon after the crossings; nobody responded to enquiries.
It is notable who shares this explanation: Morocco’s own interior ministry names as causes the “biased exploitation of the digital space”, the “promotion of misleading information” and “erroneous interpretations of legal and administrative data”. Rabat and Madrid disagree on almost everything — that a rumour was the trigger is disputed by neither. Only, that agreement is not independent confirmation: both governments have an interest in a rumour being to blame rather than their own failure. AP accordingly notes that Rabat produced no evidence for its claims.
Why this works at all
A rumour only brings seventy thousand people across a border when two things come together: a real pressure that has long been there, and a door that actually gives way. There is much to say about the pressure — the economic situation in the region around Tetouan and Fnideq, the lack of prospects for young men, a closed border trade. Less has been said about the door, and it is the more interesting part.
Because the border at Ceuta does not hold because Spain holds it. It holds because Morocco holds it.
A freelance photographer working for AP watched Moroccan gendarmes standing aside with their arms folded on the Thursday while thousands walked past them into Ceuta. On the Friday, Moroccan security forces did intervene, with tear gas, batons and water cannon. Spanish intelligence services assess the episode, according to El País and Cadena SER, as follows: not planned, but permitted.
That sentence belongs on the checklist too. It comes from Spanish services — that is, from the side that failed to hold the border and has an interest in this not being its own fault. And “arms folded” is one photographer’s observation on one day; it can mean toleration and it can simply mean being overwhelmed — seventy thousand people against a gendarmerie is a line that does not hold. AP, which supplied the picture, explicitly considers the question of deliberate opening unresolved. So do I. And the actual finding does not depend on it: whether intended or not — the border did not hold on its own strength.
A border that only holds with outside help is not a border. It is a subscription. And subscriptions can be paused — except that the service being bought here consists of stopping people. Sometimes fatally.
Three things make this subscription particularly delicate. First, the provider does not recognise the border itself: Morocco has officially claimed Ceuta and Melilla since the early 1960s. Belarus does not want to annex Lithuania; that is the difference from the comparison currently being made everywhere. Second, Spain cannot switch providers — an exclave is surrounded by exactly one state. And third, the dependency is one-sided: Morocco now has many takers for its cooperation, Spain has no second Morocco.
Seventy years, four episodes
The pattern is old, and it is better understood if you do not read it as a Moroccan character trait.
In 1957 the “Moroccan Army of Liberation” pushed into the Spanish territories of Ifni and Spanish Sahara. Officially this was not a government matter: Rabat denied any involvement, and regular units demonstrably were not deployed. In practice the line between irregulars and the state was porous. In early April 1958 Spain ceded the Tarfaya zone.
1975 brought the same method, eighteen years later and on a grand scale. The International Court of Justice found in an advisory opinion that there was no tie of territorial sovereignty between Western Sahara and Morocco. Three weeks later Hassan II had some 350,000 unarmed civilians driven to the border; some of them crossed it on 6 November and camped in front of a Spanish minefield. The marchers were unarmed. The operation was not: according to several accounts, soldiers in civilian clothes marched within the columns, and in the days beforehand Moroccan troops had already crossed the north-eastern border. Spain could have ended this militarily and did not — no European army shoots at unarmed civilians, and that was precisely the calculation. A few days later Madrid handed over the administration.
In 2021 Spain admitted the Polisario leader Brahim Ghali under a false identity for COVID treatment. Rabat called this “a premeditated act” of which Morocco took note “and from which it will draw all consequences”. Weeks later Moroccan border forces showed conspicuous passivity — official explanation: exhaustion after Ramadan. More than 8,000 people came across, among them about 1,500 unaccompanied minors. In March 2022 Spain reversed course and declared Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara the “most serious, realistic and credible basis”.
Three times the same outcome, twice for the same reason: in 1975 and 2021 Europe had no answer to unarmed people that it would have been willing to use itself; in 1957 it was deniability that shielded the operation. That is not a Moroccan invention. It is a European gap in the arithmetic — and anyone who notices it can exploit it.
And 2026? Here I have to be honest: this fourth episode has no outcome yet. The series is open. Anyone closing it now is telling a story that has not finished.
What is on the calendar for 2026, however, does not have to be guessed. In 2024 the European Court of Justice annulled the EU’s decisions on the fisheries and agriculture agreements with Morocco because the consent of the Sahrawi people was missing. On 29 January 2026 the EU, in a joint communiqué with Rabat, welcomed UN Resolution 2797, which makes Morocco’s autonomy proposal the basis for negotiations — the text expressly holds to the self-determination of the Sahrawi people, and the EU does not recognise Moroccan sovereignty. In late July the United States affirmed exactly the opposite: first Secretary of State Rubio on 30 July, then a message from Trump published by Rabat on 1 August — that they recognise Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. And on 31 October 2026 the mandate of the UN mission MINURSO expires. None of this proves an intention. It only says what is going to be negotiated this year anyway.
There is also a second neighbour: ten days before the crisis, on 20 July, Prime Minister Sánchez was in Algiers, sealing the normalisation after a good four years of rupture — a rupture that was the direct consequence of that 2022 shift on Western Sahara. Algeria is Polisario’s protecting power. In North Africa, Spain is not facing a supplier but standing between two sides, and every move towards one is a provocation of the other.
A fifth case belongs here precisely because it does not fit the pattern. In June 2022 Moroccan forces at the Melilla fence did not withdraw — they acted with extreme severity. According to Moroccan government figures 23 people died; UN experts and Amnesty International speak of at least 37, and a Moroccan human rights organisation counts 77 missing. The Spanish public prosecutor closed the investigation in December 2022 and declared the 470 summary returns lawful — the Spanish ombudsman had reached the opposite conclusion. In the same decision it noted that only Morocco held all the evidence. So outsourced border control kills even when it works exactly as ordered. Anyone who concludes from the Ceuta crisis that the outsourcing merely needs to be made more reliable should read that paragraph twice.
“So who is behind it?”
The question is legitimate, and I have no time for dismissing it as naive. It deserves an answer — and the answer is: we do not know, and less has been produced so far than many videos suggest.
Russia: The claim comes not from the EU but from the Ukrainian government. Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha cited more than 1,500 publications on 31 July across a network identified by analysts as pro-Russian. That is a party to a conflict with a legitimate but distinctly own interest. EU home affairs commissioner Magnus Brunner said on 4 August that it was “too early” to link this to Russia; Europol and other bodies are examining it. An analysis by the Spanish OSINT specialist Chema Gil describes a different layer: the mobilisation itself, spread across five countries, with Algeria as the main node — he attributes direction to nobody. That belongs in the picture too: the neighbour that has contradicted Morocco the longest turns up in the trail of the mobilisation. Both can be true at once: a movement can be exploited for propaganda without having been triggered by it.
What is missing is more striking. The EU platform EUvsDisinfo, which monitors Russian disinformation campaigns, has to this day published not a single analysis on Ceuta — its database returns zero hits for “Ceuta” and seven for “Morocco”. And no proceeding under the Digital Services Act is known in this case; though that means little, because such proceedings target platforms rather than events, and five days would be unprecedentedly fast.
The United States: Here there is more material, and it is uncomfortable. A committee report of the US House of Representatives from April — non-binding — describes Ceuta and Melilla as administered by Spain but located “in Moroccan territory”. (The circulating sharpened version, that the report calls them “occupied” territory, is false; the Spanish fact-checking service Newtral corrected this specifically.) The analyst Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute publicly called on 16 March 2026 for Morocco to stage a second Green March on the exclaves — to march in unarmed and raise the flag. And during the crisis the US State Department declared the incident to be “the direct result of the Spanish Government’s deliberate efforts” to enable mass illegal migration into Europe. The accusation, then, is intent, not merely poor policy.
And yet: AP explicitly records that there is no evidence for an American or Israeli hand in this crisis. The Corriere della Sera gathered the indications and wrote the most honest sentence in the whole debate — and both halves belong to it: “Not even five levels of indications amount to proof in geopolitics. But five levels of indications remain.”
What the Rubin case actually shows is something else, and more interesting than a director: the script has been lying in the drawer, in public, since 1975. Anyone can read it, anyone can point to it, and nobody has to stage it for it to be performed. You do not need a director for a play that has been in the repertoire for fifty years.
A checklist for the next report What would actually be evidence of state direction? An instruction, a payment, an intercepted order, the statement of a named participant, a document. None of that is currently on the table. Temporal proximity is not evidence. Congratulations on a national holiday are not evidence — Xi Jinping and German President Steinmeier also sent them for Morocco’s Throne Day on 30 July. And a trade report is not evidence: that Russia took on a cargo of petrol in the port of Tangier in mid-July, according to Reuters, rests on two anonymous industry sources — the same sources from which the claim comes that a Russian corporation was the supplier. Morocco cannot have produced the petrol in any case: the country’s only refinery has stood idle since 2015. “Russia imports petrol from Morocco” is a statement about a port, not about an intention.
The same checklist applies to Rabat. There too there is no instruction, no document, no payment — there is a photograph of gendarmes with folded arms and the assessment of a foreign intelligence service. That is more than nothing. It is less than proof. In Madrid, the Audiencia Nacional has been examining whether there was a “concerted action”, publicly known since 3 August. So judicially, the question is open as well.
What Europe made of one week
The headlines said Italy had “suspended the Schengen agreement with Spain”. That was Rome’s framing — Prime Minister Meloni had announced precisely that in public — and many German outlets adopted it. Italy’s own interior minister Piantedosi described it differently at the meeting of EU interior ministers: a temporary reintroduction of controls at internal air and sea borders, an instrument expressly provided for in the Schengen Borders Code — one which, as he added, numerous member states have used, Spain included. The notification to the Commission runs from 1 August to 1 September. One member state cannot exclude another from the Schengen area in any case.
The aside that Italy has no border with Spain at all is only half right too: there is no land border — air and sea borders very much exist, and that is exactly where the measure applies.
So that this does not stay one-sided: Madrid framed things as well. Sánchez called the crossings an “attack” and a “violation of territorial integrity” — while carefully avoiding any direct accusation against Rabat. Hard enough for his own public, vague enough not to lose the provider.
I am not saying this to reassure anyone. I am saying it because the exaggeration was a gift to those who claim Europe is falling apart. “EU country closes border to EU country” was one of the most effective sharpenings of the week — and it was a government’s framing, not the event.
That does not make the event harmless. France, which has been checking all internal borders since May anyway, reinforced controls towards Spain on 31 July; Spain had already summoned the Italian ambassador on 30 July after Foreign Minister Tajani called for the Schengen area to be closed towards Spain. And after the special meeting of EU interior ministers on 4 August, the French interior minister Nuñez said the sentence that matters: there had been “informational interference by foreign states” which used these images to criticise European migration policy and “to try to drive the member states against one another”. The weak point was not the external border. It was the relationship of the member states to each other.
And then the answer Europe found. The statement on the special meeting of interior ministers on 4 August names five fields: combating smuggling networks, strengthening returns, strengthening EU borders, deepening partnerships with third countries, improving foresight. And then, one paragraph further on, the sentence that matters: better shared situational awareness, which “could be achieved by further developing early-warning systems such as pre-frontier intelligence and social media monitoring”.
No decision, no mandate, no deadline: an informal video conference, a “common understanding”, a conditional. This is exactly how these things begin. Out of a crisis caused by rumours in private WhatsApp groups, the monitoring of social networks is on paper within five days, without anyone having had to decide on it. That may be sensible in a given case. But it is also the same old pattern: a real problem becomes the occasion for a power that afterwards stays, and whose effect is never measured.
One gap stands out in this. The trigger of this crisis was platforms — Facebook, WhatsApp, TikTok, Instagram. From not one of those platforms is a public statement on Ceuta to be found to this day. The user is to be monitored regardless.
What could be done — and what it costs
Diagnoses are cheap, so here is the honest bill. Europe has essentially five options, and each has a price tag.
Run the procedures itself, at the border, with its own staff, instead of buying prevention. This is not about generosity but about something self-evident: that it is examined who has a right to protection before it is decided who leaves. In rule-of-law terms the cleanest solution. Expensive, staff-intensive and currently almost impossible to get through domestically.
Decouple the cooperation — stop tying fisheries, trade and visas to migration control. It takes the lever away from the neighbour. It also takes away Europe’s cooperation, because that was never free.
Hold the platforms responsible instead of the users. The Digital Services Act exists; it requires risk assessments and responses to coordinated manipulation. It has not been applied here. It costs a fight with very large corporations — but far fewer civil liberties than blanket “social media monitoring”.
Invoke the legal framework — and know what comes with it. The EU has a word for this: “instrumentalisation”. It is written into a regulation that has applied since 1 July 2026. The regulation requires actions “with the aim of destabilising the Union or a Member State” — but the recitals let it suffice that the actions are “indicative” of such an aim. There is no formal designation of Morocco, and not because Brussels examined the matter and said no, but because the procedure knows no designation of countries at all: it establishes a situation, not a state. Belarus was indeed named this way politically by the Council and the European Council in 2021; nobody has been designated under this regulation to date. Whoever invokes the framework gets registration deadlines of up to four weeks, border procedures for practically all applications and — via the Schengen Borders Code — the option of closing border crossing points. That is not a side effect, that is the purpose of the rule.
Carry on and raise the price. More money, more technology, more equipment for the neighbour. The option no government articulates and which is nevertheless the most likely: it costs no political capital and extends the dependency by exactly the time one currently needs.
The uncomfortable point is this: the dependency is not sloppiness. It was a decision, and for decades it was the cheapest one available. The price simply fell due later — and in a different currency from the one that was paid.
What remains from this week
First: when an image fits your expectation perfectly, that is not an argument that it is true but a reason to pause. The most effective forgeries of this week were not products of fantasy — they were genuine footage of genuine events, only in a different place and at a different time. A false caption is cheaper than a fabricated reality and works just as well.
Second: shifting numbers are a sign of work, not of lies. 34, 43, 57, 67, 72, 75 — that is not a cover-up, that is a counter running while divers are still searching. And the city of Ceuta’s 88 is not the next stage of the same count but a different yardstick. Anyone who takes such differences for fraud makes themselves receptive to the next fraud.
Third: the question “who is behind it?” is admissible, but it is not the first one. The first is: why could this work at all? To that question there is a demonstrable answer, and it has nothing to do with Moscow or Washington. It is: because for decades a European external border has been secured by someone who does not recognise that border — and because that was cheaper than any alternative.
The fifteenth of August
Lastly, not an analysis but a warning — with a qualification that belongs to it.
El País gained access to five Facebook groups with around 400,000 members and nine WhatsApp groups; the fact-checking organisation Maldita was in four WhatsApp and ten Facebook groups and found more than fifty relevant Instagram accounts. El País puts the membership of Maldita’s ten groups at 422,560 — the groups are likely to overlap in part.
In them, a new crossing on 15 August is being discussed. “See you there on the fifteenth. Be on time,” reads one of the messages. But it is by no means certain that anything will come of it: in the same groups many consider the date a trap, and El País thinks it possible that the date is meant above all to draw people to the coast, where smugglers are waiting. Alongside this, disinformation continues to circulate: a supposed asylum offer from the European Commission that does not exist; the claim that anyone with a trade will not be sent back; and again and again the same sentence, that the door is open.
And in those same groups this also stands, addressed by one participant to the others: “Is your life so cheap? Leave the people of Ceuta alone.”
The sentence is a reminder of what is most easily lost in this whole reckoning. Nobody had to persuade these people. It was enough to stop standing in their way. At least 86 died in the process — 75 according to the Spanish government delegation, eleven more on Moroccan territory and in Moroccan waters; the city of Ceuta counts 88 on the Spanish side alone. They did not die of a message, but in the water and in the crush. Yet without that message they would not have been there on that day — and to this day nobody knows who wrote it.
On 15 August it will become clear which of the two doors was meant. Whether a rumour will circulate again is no longer a question; it already is. The question is whether someone will again be standing by with folded arms — and whether we can tell the difference at the first image.
You now know the three questions. That is more than most will have when the pictures arrive.
If you found this piece useful: share it with someone who saw the images from Ceuta. There were quite a few of them.