Morocco blames misinformation for Ceuta migrant rush; Israel conspiracy theories spread

Morocco’s Interior Ministry said on Sunday that recent mass crossings to the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla were fuelled by misinformation on social media, human trafficking networks and misinterpretation of a Spanish ruling banning immediate returns of migrants intercepted at sea.

Spanish officials said the death toll from the mass rush of migrants from Morocco into Ceuta last week reached at least 72 on Sunday, as five more bodies were found along the North African coast.

More than 50,000 people crossed into Ceuta by land and sea in an unprecedented surge that began on Thursday at one of the European Union’s only two land borders with Africa, prompting alarm across the bloc. More than 48,000 returned to Morocco within 48 hours and more did so over the weekend, Spanish authorities said.

The Spanish government representative in Ceuta, Miguel Angel Perez, told reporters on Sunday that, in addition to the 72 fatalities, more than 1,000 people had been treated by health services. The situation in the enclave had improved markedly, he said, but more remained to be done to re-establish normality.

Some migrants drowned and others were crushed while trying to climb a breakwater and border fence. Many had been driven to migrate by economic hardship and encouraged by social media rumors.

The number of fatalities was considerably higher than what was announced by Moroccan authorities on Sunday. Morocco’s Interior Ministry said in a statement on Sunday that 11 people had died, mostly by drowning while trying to cross into Spanish territory, noting that it was fact-checking reports on deaths from the other side of the border.

The ministry blamed the rush of migrants on social media misinformation, human trafficking networks and misinterpretation of a Spanish ruling banning immediate returns of migrants intercepted at sea. That statement was similar to the Spanish Foreign Ministry’s comments on the matter.

Moroccan authorities set the number of those involved in the crossing at 40,000, far lower than the figure used by Spanish officials, adding that 1,135 were stopped from entering Melilla, another Spanish enclave.

The statement reiterated that Morocco was committed to countering illegal migration and called for the burden of managing migration to be shared.

Following the crisis in Ceuta last week, posts accusing Israel and Jewish people of orchestrating the event spread quickly on social media, reaching an estimated 103 million people on X within 72 hours, according to an analysis by the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Antisemitism Research Center (ARC).

The report examined 173 high-impact posts from 119 influencer accounts. Together they generated 57.5 million views, an estimated reach of 103.1 million, 1.9 million likes, and 368,400 shares in two days, ARC calculated.

Posters falsely claimed that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directed migrants into Spain due to its policies regarding Israel. In one, viewed 5.3 million times, an AI-generated image showed a boat sporting a giant Netanyahu figurehead, with a line of migrants filing out from his open mouth onto a Spanish beach, ARC said.

If we're being honest about what's going on in Spain: pic.twitter.com/lSiUjg3kmy

— Forbidden HQ ???? (@WearForbidden) July 31, 2026

Another account claimed Israel had “admitted” engineering the migration through Mossad.

“This is not a story about a few bad actors,” said CAM CEO Sacha Roytman Dratwa. “It is a story about a platform whose design rewards the fastest and most inflammatory explanation available, and on X that explanation is increasingly a Jewish conspiracy.”

Diplomatic tensions flared between Spain and Israel on Friday after Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon slammed the Spanish government for its handling of the country’s migrant crisis, prompting backlash in Madrid and a public rebuke from Israel’s top diplomat in Spain.

“Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy,” Danon wrote on X. “Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.”

Spanish Transportation Minister Óscar Puente Santiago responded to Danon’s post directly, writing, “Well, things are starting to get pretty clear.”

Though vague, Puente’s remark was largely interpreted as supporting the growing conspiracy theories that Israel and the United States haf helped orchestrate the incursion.

The conspiracy theory surrounding Spain’s migrant crisis was further promoted by spokesperson of the Republican Left of Catalonia party Gabriel Rufián, who wrote on X, “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.”

Ceuta leader Juan Jesus Vivas told the newspaper El Pais the city’s morgue had received 88 corpses, including some who had died in earlier, smaller attempts to reach the territory in hazardous night-time swims over the past two weeks. He said Moroccan authorities were also recovering bodies from the sea, but no official information was available.

Authorities have reinforced police and army patrols. A 500-meter (1,600-foot) floating barrier was installed off Ceuta on Saturday.

“It pains me deeply that young people are dying at sea. It’s not right that, in the year 2026, women with children as young as two months old should be crossing the sea only to die,” Karima Abenaz, a French national in Ceuta with family in Morocco, said while holding back tears.

“In Morocco, there’s food, there’s everything we need,” she added. “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, it’s not right.”

Twenty-two European Union member states wrote a letter asking for coordinated action to protect external borders and other measures after the Ceuta incident. Italy suspended passport-free Schengen travel arrangements with Spain for one month.

Spain has adopted a more open stance on migrants than most other EU countries, introducing a program to grant residency to more than half a million undocumented people.

It has rejected suggestions that the scheme encouraged the rush into Ceuta, saying that those who entered the enclave irregularly could not travel on to mainland Spain or elsewhere in the Schengen zone.

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