Ceuta dossier: This article asks why people travelled and why the false promise that “Ceuta is open” became believable. For the evidence about Moroccan border enforcement and the European political response, see Ceuta: What the Evidence Shows — and How Europe Reacted.

Update — 10 September 2026

Newly declassified Spanish intelligence documents materially change what can be said about what Spain knew before the mass crossing on 30 July. They strengthen the evidence concerning failures on the Moroccan side of the border and update the known humanitarian consequences. They do not overturn this article’s central reconstruction of how the false promise that “Ceuta is open” influenced individual decisions, and they still do not identify who originated that claim.

Spain had a specific warning

On 9 September, the Spanish government published 40 reports, alerts and communications from the National Police, Guardia Civil, National Intelligence Centre (CNI) and military intelligence covering the period before and during the crisis.

The documents show that on 29 July at 13:52, the CNI warned the Spanish government’s delegation in Ceuta that social media contained a call for an “assault by fence and sea” the following day at 8 pm. It said the organisers intended to exploit Morocco’s Throne Day, when Moroccan security forces were expected to be occupied elsewhere, and noted two online groups with a combined following of about 180,000.

The CNI sent a similar warning to the Guardia Civil. It also sent a formal note that evening to Morocco’s DGST and DGED intelligence services describing plans for people to enter Ceuta on 30 July by climbing the fence or swimming around it.

That establishes something more specific than a general awareness of rising migration pressure. Spanish intelligence knew that a coordinated crossing was being promoted for a particular date, by identified routes, with a stated time and substantial online reach, and it warned authorities on both sides of the border.

It does not establish that the extraordinary scale of what followed was predicted. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has argued that officials knew about and monitored the campaign but that it did not indicate the scale, nature or probability of the subsequent crossing. Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares has likewise said he had no information pointing to an influx of the magnitude that occurred.

The remaining question is therefore not simply whether Spain was warned. It is whether the information available before 30 July should reasonably have triggered preparations for an event on anything approaching the scale that followed.

The evidence concerning Morocco is stronger, but still bounded

The declassified material also gives firmer support to concerns about Moroccan border enforcement.

A Spanish Defence Ministry intelligence report issued on 30 July described Moroccan forces as passive and negligent. A CNI note said that no proactive Moroccan response to the loss of control had been observed beyond the deployment of a small number of riot-control units, and that the increased presence of police and gendarmes had proved insufficient to control the crowd. The Defence Ministry assessment also said it could not rule out Morocco attempting to exploit the crisis for strategic interests.

A separate Spanish National Police report, reported by RTVE before the wider declassification, goes further. It alleges unusual permissiveness and says Moroccan gendarmes, including uniformed and plain-clothes personnel, guided groups of migrants during parts of the crossing.

Those allegations are serious, but they are not the same as proof that Morocco’s government planned or ordered the mass movement. Spain’s police director has said the report does not attribute the planning of the arrival to Morocco, and Sánchez has said the government has found no evidence establishing Moroccan state orchestration.

The evidence now supports a stronger but narrower conclusion: passivity, inadequate enforcement and alleged operational assistance by Moroccan security personnel are better evidenced than they were when this article was first published. A Moroccan government order to create or orchestrate the surge remains unproven.

The humanitarian consequences were worse than the original baseline showed

When this article was published on 8 August, Spanish forensic teams were handling 80 bodies recovered after the rush, Morocco had reported 11 deaths on its side and Ceuta’s president had estimated around 100 deaths overall. That was the best dated baseline then available.

By 9 September, AP and Reuters reported that NGOs estimated more than 140 deaths. That figure remains an attributed estimate rather than a final confirmed toll.

The number of people still in Ceuta is also contested. AP reports about 5,000 remaining according to Spain’s national government, while local officials put the number as high as 10,000. Reuters, citing local authorities, reported more than 10,000 migrants, including unaccompanied minors, still in Ceuta six weeks after the surge. These figures should not be collapsed into a single agreed total.

What the update changes — and what it does not

The new documents establish that Spain’s intelligence service had a specific advance warning and had communicated it to both Spanish and Moroccan authorities. They also strengthen the evidence that Moroccan border enforcement was passive or inadequate during crucial periods.

They still do not establish who first transformed narrower legal and political developments into the message that “Ceuta is open.” Nor do they prove that the Moroccan government ordered the mass crossing.

The analytical separation in the original article therefore remains necessary:

  1. What persuaded people to travel towards Ceuta?
  2. Who created, organised or amplified the messages telling them to go?
  3. Why did Moroccan border enforcement fail to prevent the crossing?
  4. Was that failure incapacity, deliberate passivity, local operational behaviour or an organised decision of the Moroccan state?

The strongest conclusion after the declassification is this:

Spain’s intelligence service knew that a large, coordinated crossing was being promoted for 30 July and warned both Spanish and Moroccan authorities. What remains unresolved is whether the extraordinary scale was reasonably foreseeable, who originated and amplified the mobilisation, and whether Morocco’s failure to contain it reflected incapacity, deliberate passivity or an organised state decision.

Ayoub El Abyad was 16 years old and twelve hours from Ceuta when he saw the videos.

Young people were getting across. He and his cousin watched them on Instagram, decided to head north and hitchhiked with two drivers towards Ceuta.

Ayoub explained his decision to Reuters simply:

“Migration is about improving our lives.”

He was talking about his future.

That can be difficult to see once thousands of people become a crowd. From Europe, the pictures showed a mass of people moving towards a border. Governments talked about sovereignty and security. Politicians talked about migration, illegality and control.

Look more closely and the crowd breaks apart.

Dounia Kherradi, a waitress from Lqliaa, told Reuters that her wages were not enough to support her parents and daughter. She had gone looking for a better future.

Anas Amrani, Yahya Harak and Ismail Atik, three friends from Larache, saw an Instagram video claiming that the border would open and decided the possibility was worth pursuing.

Omar Danbor was 17 and lived in Fnideq. He later gave a very simple reason for joining the rush: he had seen online that the border was open, so he went.

Their circumstances and motives were not identical. But running through many of their accounts was something familiar: the hope that life might be better somewhere else, and enough frustration with the present to make a dangerous opportunity difficult to ignore.

Before the rumour

Beginning this story with Facebook begins it too late.

False information only changes behaviour when it finds people with a reason to act on it.

Morocco is not simply a country of desperate people waiting to escape. It has developed rapidly in many areas and has substantial economic ambitions. But job creation has not kept pace with the growth of its working-age population, and young people have been particularly affected. The World Bank reported in April that between 2000 and 2024 Morocco’s working-age population grew nearly 2.5 times faster than employment.

The International Labour Organization estimates that roughly one in three Moroccans aged 15 to 29 is neither working, studying nor in training. It describes young people’s route into stable employment as constrained by weak job creation, informality, skills mismatches and unequal access to opportunity.

Those figures cannot explain why Ayoub, Dounia or Omar made the decisions they did. They do help describe the conditions in which a message about an unexpected route into Europe could become powerful.

For some young Moroccans, Europe is associated with work, wages and independence. AP found that stories of relatives returning from Europe with cars, clothes and foreign currency helped sustain the attraction.

The motives of those who went to Ceuta varied. Some wanted work or better wages. Others wanted independence, adventure or the ability to support their families. Teenagers were among them. Some plainly made reckless decisions.

They do not need to be turned into saints, or into helpless victims, for their decisions to be understandable.

They were people making calculations about their futures.

Then, in July, the calculation appeared to change.

The message

Spain’s Supreme Court issued judgment 814/2026 on 29 June 2026 after considering the case of a man who had been intercepted at sea while trying to swim into Ceuta and then handed to Moroccan authorities.

The ruling became public on 8 July.

The court held that the special rechazo en frontera procedure in the tenth additional provision of Spain’s immigration law did not apply to people intercepted at sea while trying to swim into Ceuta or Melilla. In those circumstances, the applicable procedure was devolución under Article 58.3.

That distinction matters because devolución is still a return procedure. Under the current regulation, people intercepted while attempting irregular entry can be taken to a police station for identification and, where appropriate, returned. They have rights to legal and interpreting assistance. If the return cannot be carried out within 72 hours, judicial authorisation is required for internment.

The judgment did not open Spain’s border. It did not give anyone who reached Ceuta a permanent right to remain, and it did not create a route to mainland Spain.

But complicated legal distinctions do not always survive intact once they leave a courtroom.

The ruling entered an information network in which people were already discussing migration, routes and opportunities. Online communities devoted to reaching Ceuta existed before the mass crossing, and people were already using them to find companions and exchange information.

At almost the same time, a separate Spanish migration policy was also being misunderstood.

Spain had introduced a programme to regularise some undocumented migrants already living in the country. Posts circulated suggesting that people newly arriving from Morocco might also benefit, even though that was not what the programme provided.

Two genuine developments could therefore be combined into a message that neither actually contained: Spain was regularising some undocumented residents, and Spain’s courts had restricted one form of immediate return for swimmers.

Somewhere in the information flowing between Spain and Morocco, those much narrower facts became associated with a far simpler idea:

Ceuta is open.

The broken telephone

In Spain, the children’s game is called teléfono roto — broken telephone.

A message is passed from one person to another and changes along the way. By the time it reaches the end of the group, it can bear little resemblance to what was said at the beginning.

We still do not know exactly how the Ceuta message changed.

A complicated judgment may simply have been misunderstood. Its qualifications may have disappeared as it was shortened and reposted. Influencers or businesses connected to irregular migration may have promoted the most attractive interpretation. Different versions may have developed independently.

By late July, however, the simplified message was influencing real decisions.

Reuters recovered a reposted video in which a young Moroccan man told viewers that people who got into Ceuta would not be sent back.

That was not what the Supreme Court had ruled.

Then something happened that made the claim much easier to believe.

People began getting through.

When possibility became proof

23 July

By 23 July, around 100 people had reached Ceuta, according to local reporting later cited by Reuters.

For someone considering the journey, photographs of successful arrivals carried a different weight from a rumour on a phone. People could see that others had made it.

28 July

El Faro de Ceuta published footage of young people who had successfully crossed.

Migrants later told Reuters that images of successful arrivals encouraged people in Morocco to attempt the crossing themselves. The journalists were documenting what was happening in Ceuta. For someone watching in Morocco, the same pictures could appear to confirm something else:

They made it.

The rumour was beginning to acquire evidence of its own.

29 July

Influencers began posting their crossings.

Mounim Belhaj, a dog groomer with 31,000 Instagram followers, told Reuters that Spanish media reports showing migrants receiving accommodation had encouraged him to try.

Other material was misleading. One video seen millions of times supposedly showed someone swimming towards Ceuta. Reuters established that it had actually been filmed elsewhere on Morocco’s Atlantic coast.

Accurate reporting, genuine successful crossings, misunderstandings and outright falsehoods were now moving through the same networks.

30 July

Then the numbers surged.

AP described packed buses arriving in Fnideq, full trains and taxis carrying people towards the frontier after online claims convinced thousands that an unusual opportunity existed.

People shared possible swimming routes. Facebook users examined vessel-tracking services for apparent gaps in coastguard patrols. Others discussed inflatable boats and wetsuits.

The attraction of the message was no longer only that crossing appeared possible. It appeared possible now.

For somebody who had spent years believing that Europe was inaccessible, that difference mattered. An opportunity that might disappear again encourages a very different decision from one that will still exist next month.

Why they went

Spain estimates that around 72,000 people entered Ceuta during the surge. Morocco disputes that figure and has put the number closer to 40,000. On Spain’s figures, most returned quickly: by 3 August, Spanish authorities said about 69,500 had returned to Morocco. Later estimates of how many remained in Ceuta were higher and continued to diverge; the dated update above records the current figures.

Numbers on that scale are useful for governments and emergency planners. They are less useful for understanding individual decisions.

The people interviewed afterwards give us something numbers cannot.

Ayoub wanted his life to improve. Dounia said her wages could not support her parents and daughter. Omar saw that the border was supposedly open and went. Three friends from Larache watched the same kind of claim and decided to try.

Their accounts do not prove what motivated everyone who travelled to Ceuta. They do establish that, for at least some of those who went, online information changed behaviour.

The desire to leave had not suddenly appeared on Instagram. Neither had the desire for security, work or independence.

The rumour did not create the dream. It created the belief that the dream had suddenly become reachable.

Whose security?

Security is one of the words running through almost every argument about Ceuta.

For Spain, security includes control of its frontier: who enters, under what law, whether the authorities can manage the numbers arriving and whether the border can be enforced.

Those are legitimate concerns.

But Dounia’s account describes another kind of security. Her wages were not enough to support her parents and daughter. For her, greater security meant being able to provide for the people who depended on her.

For someone else it may mean regular work, somewhere stable to live, enough food, healthcare, education or simply the ability to plan beyond the immediate future.

These are not unusual ambitions. In Britain or Spain we would generally regard them as ordinary parts of a decent life.

They do not become strange because the person wanting them was born in Morocco.

What changes is the way we see that person once their attempt to improve their life reaches a European border. A worker, daughter, parent or teenager becomes a migrant, and the category can begin to obscure the person inside it.

None of this requires pretending that everybody who crossed was virtuous. A crowd of tens of thousands will contain the same mixture of generosity, selfishness, recklessness and criminality found in any large population.

Their humanity does not depend on proving otherwise.

Before they became a migration problem, they were people trying to build lives.

A rumour can move people. It cannot open a border.

There is still another part of the Ceuta story.

Why did so many people go? And why were so many able to get through?

The information cascade helps with the first question. It cannot by itself answer the second.

AP reporters saw Moroccan gendarmes standing aside as large numbers moved towards Ceuta. Moroccan forces later used stronger measures to prevent further movement. Morocco denies deliberately relaxing border controls. Reuters has also reported a layered account, based on Spanish media citing officials familiar with intelligence assessments, that Morocco did not plan the mass crossing but allowed it to happen.

That dispute remains unresolved. The declassified evidence published after this article first appeared strengthens the case that Moroccan enforcement was passive or inadequate during crucial periods, but it still does not prove an order by the Moroccan government; see the 10 September update above.

It matters because the motives of the people travelling towards Ceuta cannot explain the conditions that allowed so many of them to enter.

But whatever eventually emerges about decisions made by governments, the aspirations of the people moving north did not need to be manufactured.

They were already there.

Then they arrived

For many, reaching Ceuta did not produce the future they imagined.

Ceuta was not a doorway straight into mainland Spain. As the small territory struggled with the numbers arriving, shelter, food and water became scarce.

Mounim Belhaj had been encouraged by images suggesting that migrants reaching Ceuta were being looked after. Afterwards, he described what he found there in three words:

“There was only hunger.”

Most adults returned to Morocco within days. Thousands remained after the initial returns, including unaccompanied children and other people who could not simply be returned.

Omar Danbor came back exhausted. He told AP that he regretted going.

AP also described another 16-year-old who had grown up only a short distance from Ceuta. Europe had always been physically close and practically unreachable. After seeing claims that the border was open, he joined the rush.

Days later he was back in Morocco, crying and asking strangers for money for a taxi home.

Nothing about the physical distance between Morocco and Europe had changed.

For a few days, what changed was his belief about whether that distance could be crossed.

Some did not come back

At the breakwater, the rush became lethal.

Migrants interviewed by AP described people being knocked into the water and trapped beneath others as crowds tried to climb onto wet concrete and rock.

Lahcen Kalouch, who reached Ceuta and later returned to Morocco, described having to climb out over the body of someone who had already died.

At the article’s original publication on 8 August, the final death toll was unresolved. By 7 August, Spanish forensic teams were handling 80 bodies recovered after the rush in Ceuta. Morocco had earlier officially reported 11 deaths on its side of the border, while Ceuta’s president Juan Jesús Vivas had estimated around 100 deaths overall a day earlier. Identification and accounting were still continuing. The 10 September update above records the later NGO estimate of more than 140 deaths.

Those deaths should not become another anonymous statistic.

The people who died had reached a point where entering the sea, climbing a breakwater or joining an enormous crowd at a frontier appeared worth the danger.

Understanding why they reached that point does not require approving of the decision. It requires asking what they believed was worth taking the risk for.

Who broke the telephone?

We still do not know who first transformed a narrow Spanish legal judgment into the claim that Ceuta was open.

AP could not establish who operated several of the accounts spreading that message, some of which disappeared after the crossing. Reuters likewise found that original posts and groups had vanished, making parts of the information trail difficult to reconstruct.

Copies may still survive in screenshots, saved videos and forwarded WhatsApp conversations. Following those traces may eventually show whether the original distortion was a mistake, a deliberate lie or something in between.

Someone may have knowingly exaggerated the judgment. People may have profited from the resulting movement. Organised amplification may have occurred. Equally, an ordinary misunderstanding may have existed before anyone realised it could be commercially or politically useful.

Finding the first broken link would answer an important question.

It would not answer the deeper one:

Why did so many people want the message to be true?

Before the border

Wealthy countries tend to begin migration stories when somebody arrives: when a boat reaches a beach, someone climbs a fence or a crowd approaches a checkpoint.

By then much of the human story has already happened.

It began with someone wondering whether their job would ever pay enough. With a teenager looking across the water at a place that seemed close enough to see and too far away to reach. With somebody trying to support a parent or child, or wanting independence and the chance to build a different future.

No society can guarantee everybody wealth, and no country can promise that everyone who wishes to live there will be allowed to do so. Borders exist, and governments have to make decisions about entry.

But housing, food, work, healthcare, education and physical safety are not extravagant ambitions. They are the foundations on which people try to build ordinary lives.

For a few extraordinary days in July, thousands of people believed that one route towards such a life had unexpectedly opened.

It had not.

The message was false. Ceuta had never opened.

But the hope behind it was real.

The broken telephone explains how the message travelled. Hope and desperation explain why anybody answered it.

What is fact and what is interpretation

Fact: Spain’s Supreme Court judgment 814/2026 is dated 29 June 2026 and held that the special rechazo en frontera procedure did not apply to people intercepted at sea while trying to swim into Ceuta or Melilla.

Fact: Spain’s current immigration regulation provides a separate devolución procedure for people intercepted while attempting irregular entry, with legal and interpreting assistance and judicial authorisation required for internment if return cannot be carried out within 72 hours.

Fact: Reuters and AP documented false or incomplete claims online that Ceuta was open or that people who reached it could not be returned.

Fact: AP interviewed people who said those claims influenced their decision to travel toward Ceuta.

Fact: Spain estimates around 72,000 people entered during the surge; Morocco disputes that figure. Spain said about 69,500 had returned by 3 August.

Fact: Declassified Spanish records published on 9 September show that on 29 July the CNI warned the government delegation in Ceuta, the Guardia Civil and Moroccan intelligence services about organised calls for crossings on 30 July by fence and sea. The communications identified a stated time and large social-media reach.

Fact: Spanish intelligence assessments issued during the crisis described Moroccan enforcement as passive or insufficient and recorded an absence of an effective proactive response during crucial periods.

Fact: A separate Spanish police report, as reported by RTVE, alleges that Moroccan gendarmes and plain-clothes personnel guided groups of migrants. Spain’s police director says the report does not attribute planning of the mass arrival to Morocco, and the Spanish government says it has no proof of Moroccan state orchestration.

Fact: At original publication, Spanish forensic teams were handling 80 bodies recovered after the rush and the overall toll was unsettled. By 9 September, NGOs cited by AP and Reuters estimated more than 140 deaths.

Fact: Estimates of the number still in Ceuta remain disputed: AP reports about 5,000 according to the national government and up to 10,000 according to local officials; Reuters reports more than 10,000 according to local authorities.

Limit: The original source of the open-border claim has not been established.

Limit: The information cascade helps explain why people moved toward Ceuta; it does not by itself explain why so many were able to cross or establish a final account of Moroccan state responsibility.

Interpretation: The rumour gained power because it landed among people who already had reasons to want work, security, independence or a different future, and because successful crossings made the false promise appear increasingly plausible.

TWIS frame: Migration policy is usually discussed through the receiving state’s security. This story also asks what security meant to the people who believed they had found a route toward it.

Sources and evidence

This article uses:

Cite this piece

This Week in Smoke, “The Broken Telephone at Ceuta,” 8 August 2026; updated 10 September 2026.