Freddie Ponton<\/a> On the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar, a narrow border separates Morocco from a piece of Spain. On the night of July 29, that border gave way.\u00a0Tens of thousands of young men<\/a>\u00a0surged into Ceuta by land and sea, following online claims that the crossing had been opened. By morning, bodies were being pulled from the water and collected from the fence.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It looked like chaos, but it did not come without warning. For years, Israeli and American political figures had threatened Spain over Gaza, questioned its sovereignty in North Africa and presented Ceuta as a pressure point. Months before the crossing, a former Pentagon adviser\u00a0published the method<\/a>\u00a0almost exactly as it later unfolded, calling on Morocco to send an unarmed mass march into the city while NATO stood aside.<\/p> This investigation follows the trail that preceded the crowd, through Israeli threats, Washington pressure, Moroccan lobbying, military agreements and a digital mobilisation that delivered tens of thousands of people to one of Spain\u2019s most exposed borders. The fence gave way only after powerful interests had spent years explaining exactly what Spain\u2019s loss of control over Ceuta could achieve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the night of July 29, 2026, an estimated\u00a070,000 people<\/a>, mostly young men, crossed from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta in under forty-eight hours. At least\u00a088 people died<\/a>\u00a0at the border fence, and in the water; a toll Spanish authorities and news organisations repeatedly revised upwards in the days that followed.\u00a0Morocco\u2019s Interior Ministry<\/a>\u00a0put the figure at 11, while the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH<\/a>)\u00a0estimated<\/a>\u00a0that nearly 130 people had died. More than a thousand required medical treatment, yet days later there was still no agreed account of how many lives the crossing had taken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Moroccan police were present along the route<\/a>\u00a0in visible numbers. Videos circulating within hours showed officers watching the crowds pass and, in some cases, appearing to direct people towards crossing points rather than stopping them. By the weekend, testimony published by international news organisations had made those images harder to dismiss. Several people who reached Ceuta\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0Moroccan officers had told them, \u201cGo that way\u201d or \u201cCome to Spain.\u201d The force capable of stopping the movement was not absent. It was there, along the route, as tens of thousands advanced towards the border. That shifts the investigation away from how Morocco lost control of the crossing and towards the evidence that, for the crucial hours in which it gathered momentum, control was deliberately withheld.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within a day, Spain\u2019s government said the situation had almost entirely reversed, with most of the crowd returning voluntarily to Morocco. According to Spanish Government Delegate in\u00a0Ceuta Miguel \u00c1ngel P\u00e9rez Triano<\/a>\u00a0on 3 August 2026, approximately 2,500 irregular migrants remained in the city,\u00a0 a number that, based on Interior Ministry data, exceeded Ceuta\u2019s capacity to care for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Spanish Interior Ministry credited<\/a>\u00a0Moroccan authorities with cooperating \u201cfaithfully and permanently\u201d and with preventing the arrival of even larger numbers. Morocco\u2019s embassy in Madrid called the cooperation \u201cexemplary.\u201d Unnamed Moroccan diplomatic sources told\u00a0Euronews<\/a>\u00a0the same week that the assistance on the ground had actually been \u201climited and insufficient to contain the pressure.\u201d Both accounts referred to the same forty-eight hours, but they point in different directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Washington did not direct its criticism at Rabat.\u00a0State<\/a>m<\/a>ents<\/a>\u00a0from American officials and allied commentators in the days that followed focused instead on Madrid, particularly Pedro S\u00e1nchez\u2019s positions on Gaza, Spain\u2019s refusal to allow the United States to use its air bases during the Iran campaign, and the government\u2019s broader posture towards Israel.\u00a0The US State Department raised its travel advisory<\/a>\u00a0for Ceuta, while American commentary presented the crisis as the consequence of Spain\u2019s failure to secure its borders. Morocco, whose government controlled the frontier through which the crowds passed, faced no equivalent public criticism from Washington. Nor did it face any from Jerusalem. Israel\u2019s ambassador to the United Nations,\u00a0Danny Danon<\/a>, used the crisis to describe Ceuta and Melilla as \u201ccolonial enclaves\u201d that Spain should explain before lecturing anyone else. Spain\u2019s transport minister, \u00d3scar Puente, replied: \u201cWell, things are starting to get pretty clear.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The response did more than spare Morocco scrutiny. It redirected responsibility towards Spain and placed the crisis inside arguments Washington and Jerusalem had already been making against S\u00e1nchez for months. The crossing had lasted less than forty-eight hours, but the political case used to explain it had been assembled long before the first crowds reached Ceuta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A border settled by treaty, not by conquest<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ceuta\u2019s status is not ambiguous. Portugal took the city in 1415, and Spain acquired sovereignty under the\u00a0Treaty of Lisbon<\/a>\u00a0in 1668. In 1860, the Moroccan Sultanate signed the\u00a0Treaty of <\/a>W<\/a>ad-Ras<\/a>, fixing Ceuta\u2019s modern boundaries and formally recognising Spanish sovereignty over the territory. The independent\u00a0Kingdom of Morocco<\/a>\u00a0did not emerge until 1956, nearly a century after the Sultanate had signed that recognition and more than five hundred years after Ceuta first passed into European hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The present Moroccan claim therefore does not arise from an unresolved act of decolonisation. It asks that a sovereignty recognised by Morocco\u2019s own predecessor state be treated as though that recognition never occurred. Calling Ceuta a \u201ccolonial enclave\u201d therefore does not resolve that contradiction. In fact, it conceals it<\/p>\n\n\n\n A threat made seven years in advance<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n On May 25, 2019,\u00a0Yair Netanyahu<\/a>, the Israeli prime minister\u2019s son, posted a map of Spain\u2019s North African holdings, Ceuta, Melilla, and the Albor\u00e1n Sea islands,\u00a0captioned<\/a>: \u201cDear Arabs and Muslims. Want to free occupied Arab Islamic lands? Here\u2019s a good start.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n When Spanish users responded,\u00a0he made the trade explicit<\/a>, suggesting that Israel would stop funding NGOs calling for Spain to relinquish Ceuta and Melilla if Spain stopped funding NGOs calling for Israel to relinquish Judea and Samaria. The\u00a0Times of Israel<\/a>\u00a0later described the exchange as a direct linkage between Palestinian advocacy, NGO funding and the transfer of Ceuta and Melilla to Morocco. That exchange took place seven years before Moroccans crossed into Ceuta by the tens of thousands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same argument later came from someone who did hold office. In September 2025, after Spain barred\u00a0Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich<\/a>\u00a0from entering the country over their positions on Gaza,\u00a0Ben Gvir publicly told Spain<\/a>\u00a0to \u201cgive the people from Gaza free entry.\u201d Ten months later, as tens of thousands were crossing into Ceuta,\u00a0he posted in Spanish<\/a>\u00a0to congratulate S\u00e1nchez on his \u201cdeep commitment to welcoming immigration and human diversity.\u201d He then made the demand explicit: \u201cAs someone who shows great concern for Hamas and the residents of Gaza, I call on you to translate words into actions: open the doors of Spain and grant refuge to the residents of Gaza.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n By then, migration was no longer being invoked as a hypothetical answer to Spanish policy. Ben Gvir was using a real mass crossing into Spanish territory to repeat a punishment he had prescribed ten months earlier. Ceuta had become the setting in which years of Israeli rhetoric linking Spain\u2019s territorial integrity, its support for Palestine and the movement of displaced people were brought together in a single political message.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mis felicitaciones al Presidente del Gobierno de Espa\u00f1a, Pedro S\u00e1nchez, por su profundo compromiso con la acogida de la inmigraci\u00f3n y la “diversidad humana”. Nine days after Rubin\u2019s second op-ed, a Moroccan journalist writing in the Israeli outlet\u00a0Ynet,<\/a>\u00a0Amine Ayoub, argued that Israel should reward Morocco for the Abraham Accords and punish Spain for its position on Palestine, using Ceuta and Melilla as the mechanism. The piece leaned directly on Rubin\u2019s framing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The campaign that came before the crowd<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n On March 12, 2026,\u00a0Michael Rubin<\/a>, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI<\/a>) and the\u00a0Middle East Forum<\/a>, published an op-ed arguing that Ceuta and Melilla were occupied Moroccan territory and that Spain, as a colonial power, had no standing to criticise Israel. Four days later, on March 16,\u00a0Rubin published a second piece<\/a>\u00a0proposing that Morocco organise a new Green March, invoking the name of its 1975 mass civilian crossing into Western Sahara. This time, the proposal was specific. Unarmed Moroccan civilians would advance on Ceuta and Melilla with bulldozers, breach the border fences and raise the Moroccan flag. Rubin argued that NATO\u2019s mutual-defence clause would not apply because the enclaves lie outside Europe and North America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In four days, the argument had moved from stripping Spain of legitimacy to setting out a method for breaking its border. The proposed instrument was not the Moroccan military, but a mass civilian movement directed at the fences under the assumption that Spain would be left to confront it alone. Four months later, tens of thousands of civilians moved towards Ceuta, Moroccan security controls gave way, and Spain faced precisely the dilemma Rubin\u2019s proposal had anticipated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spanish\u00a0newspapers<\/a>\u00a0picked up the articles within days and placed them within a broader Washington current favourable to Morocco, identifying the Middle East Forum, the American Enterprise Institute,\u00a0the Hudson Institute<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0Moroccan American Center for Policy<\/a>. The latter is funded by the Kingdom of Morocco, and Spanish reporting described it as financing reports, events and opinion pieces that reinforced Rabat\u2019s case against Spain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On April 3, three weeks after Rubin\u2019s second article, Representative\u00a0Mario D\u00edaz-Balart<\/a>, then chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee overseeing State Department funding, told\u00a0El Espa\u00f1ol<\/a>\u00a0that Ceuta and Melilla \u201care not in the geographic territory of Spain\u201d but \u201cin the territory of Morocco,\u201d and that their status should be negotiated between allies. On April 30, his subcommittee filed its formal\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0on the 2027 State Department appropriations bill. Under the heading \u201cMorocco,\u201d it states that \u201cthe Spanish-administered cities of Ceuta and Melilla are located in Moroccan territory\u201d and encourages the Secretary of State to promote diplomatic engagement between Morocco and Spain over their future status. The language does not appear in\u00a0H.R. 8595<\/a>, the bill passed by the House, and the committee report carries no legal force. Its significance lies elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Within seven weeks of Rubin calling Ceuta and Melilla occupied Moroccan territory, the same territorial premise had travelled from Washington commentary into an official congressional document. Morocco\u2019s claim had not become US law, but it had acquired a foothold inside the machinery that shapes US foreign policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mario D\u00edaz-Balart\u2019s office has denied that any lobbying contact with his brother took place, and his support for Morocco\u2019s territorial positions dates back to at least 2011, before the contract. What the filing establishes is that a Moroccan-funded advocacy organisation paid his brother\u2019s firm to influence US policy while formally placing D\u00edaz-Balart\u2019s congressional office behind a contractual firewall. Years later, it was D\u00edaz-Balart\u2019s subcommittee that inserted Morocco\u2019s claim over Ceuta and Melilla into an official congressional report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The House passed the broader appropriations bill on July 15, eleven weeks after the report language was filed. The mass crossing into Ceuta began fifteen days later. On July 31,\u00a0Al Jazeera\u2019s opinion desk<\/a>\u00a0asked whether Spain was being punished, noting that pro-Israel voices had \u201cconspicuously raised the issue of the enclave\u201d in the months before the crossing and citing Rubin\u2019s articles directly. Spanish, English and Arabic-language outlets subsequently reconstructed the same chronology, from Yair Netanyahu\u2019s 2019 map and Ben Gvir\u2019s migration rhetoric to Rubin\u2019s March 2026 articles, D\u00edaz-Balart\u2019s report language and the Israel\u2013Morocco defence relationship already in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of this emerged after the crossing. Before the first crowds reached Ceuta, Spain\u2019s sovereignty had been challenged, a civilian march against its border had been proposed and Morocco\u2019s territorial claim had entered an official congressional report. When the crossing came, Washington and Jerusalem turned their criticism on Madrid while leaving Rabat largely untouched. The pressure was already there. The crossing gave it force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pressure campaign was never just two men<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The proposal to replace Spain with Morocco as Washington\u2019s military partner was already in circulation. In June 2025, retired General Robert Greenway, a former Trump national security adviser and head of the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Allison Center,\u00a0wrote on X<\/a>\u00a0that it was \u201ctime to relocate NAS Rota and Mor\u00f3n Air Base\u2026 to Morocco.\u201d By April 2026, the argument had moved closer to government. After Spain refused to support the Iran campaign, the late Senator Lindsey Graham\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0for the removal of American bases from Spain to a country willing to permit their use. Jos\u00e9 Lev \u00c1lvarez, a Middle East Forum writer and former Israeli army officer,\u00a0argued<\/a>\u00a0that the Israel\u2013Morocco security relationship had created \u201ca new reality\u201d that the White House could use as leverage against Madrid. On April 24,\u00a0Reuters<\/a>\u00a0reported that an internal Pentagon email had listed possible measures against allies that resisted the Iran campaign, including suspending Spain from NATO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was no longer pressure on S\u00e1nchez alone. Spain was being told that its bases could be moved, its place in NATO reconsidered and its strategic role handed to Morocco. At the same time that Washington figures were giving Rabat\u2019s claim over Ceuta a foothold in Congress, they were laying out how Spain itself could be displaced on the other side of the Strait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n No direct Moroccan payment to Rubin, the Middle East Forum or the American Enterprise Institute appears in the public records examined for this investigation. Their available tax filings do not identify the Moroccan government or the Moroccan American Center for Policy among their disclosed sources of funding. Rubin\u2019s articles cannot therefore be traced to a commission from Rabat. They emerged from a pro-Israel political platform that had already found its own reason to advance Morocco\u2019s claim against Spain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Morocco was, however, paying for representation elsewhere in Washington. Its previous arrangement with Brownstein Hyatt had gone dormant in October 2025, and a new\u00a0$780,000 contract<\/a>\u00a0took effect on March 13, 2026, within days of Rubin\u2019s articles. Brownstein was retained at $65,000 a month to provide government-relations and public-affairs services connecting the Moroccan embassy with the US government. The next filing covering its work during the months leading to the crossing had not been published when this investigation was completed. Rubin, meanwhile, continued writing after the crossing, again calling on Washington to recognise Moroccan sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla and punish Spain for its positions on Gaza and Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The political use of Morocco\u2019s claim was already being proposed openly in Israeli media. Citing an analysis published by\u00a0Ynet<\/em>,\u00a0Diario Socialista reported<\/a>\u00a0in late April that Israel could use its influence in Washington to help Morocco press its claims over Ceuta and Melilla. The proposed return was explicit. Morocco would be rewarded for its alignment with Israel, while Spain would be punished for its positions on Iran, Palestine and NATO. The argument relied in part on\u00a0Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty<\/a>, whose geographical language does not expressly place Ceuta and Melilla under the alliance\u2019s collective-defence guarantee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was the same bargain taking shape elsewhere. D\u00edaz-Balart was introducing Morocco\u2019s territorial premise into Congress, Israel and Morocco had signed a\u00a0joint military work plan<\/a>, and Washington commentators were presenting Rabat as the partner through which Spain could be pressured or replaced. In each case, Ceuta offered the same thing\u2014a way to put pressure on Spain without confronting it directly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \ud83c\uddee\ud83c\uddf1\ud83e\udd1d\ud83c\uddf2\ud83c\udde6 Five years since the Abraham Accords: Israel and Morocco continue to deepen security cooperation.<\/p> This week in Tel Aviv, the IDF and the Moroccan Armed Forces held the 3rd Joint Military Committee meeting, concluding with the signing of the joint work plan for 2026.<\/p> The\u2026<\/p>\u2014 Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) January 5, 2026<\/a><\/blockquote>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Nine days after D\u00edaz-Balart\u2019s April 3 interview with El Espan\u00f5l, on\u00a0April 9,<\/a>\u00a0Netanyahu\u2019s government expelled Spain\u2019s access to the Kiryat Gat facility, in the U.S.-led Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC<\/a>), and said Spain would \u201cpay an immediate price<\/a>\u201d for its Gaza positions. But S\u00e1nchez did not retreat one inch, and in May, he called for the European Union to\u00a0terminate<\/a>\u00a0its Association Agreement with Israel entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The architecture that already existed<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Morocco entered 2026 with an established military relationship with Israel. In 2021, Israeli defence minister Benny Gantz and his Moroccan counterpart, Abdellatif Loudiyi,\u00a0signed<\/a>\u00a0a memorandum of understanding covering intelligence cooperation, military procurement, training and joint exercises. In January 2026, the two countries held the third meeting of their Joint Military Committee in Tel Aviv and\u00a0signed an annual work plan<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Morocco was equally embedded in Washington\u2019s regional security system. The United States designated it a major non-NATO ally in 2004, provides military financing and maintains extensive arms and training programmes with Rabat. Morocco also hosts the annual US-led\u00a0African Lion<\/a>, the largest military exercise in Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Moroccan controls on the route to Ceuta gave way on July 29, the military and intelligence channels linking Rabat with Tel Aviv and Washington were already active. The next part of the investigation is whether those channels carried anything beyond routine defence cooperation in the days before the crossing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ruling that opened a door, and the campaign that walked through it<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Spain\u2019s Supreme Court gave the crossing its mechanism.\u00a0In Judgment 814\/2026<\/a>, published July 8, it ruled that summary \u201chot returns\u201d could not be used against migrants intercepted swimming toward Ceuta or Melilla, only against those caught scaling the fence.\u00a0Spain\u2019s Interior Ministry said smugglers<\/a>\u00a0and rumor networks exploited that sea-land distinction directly, and most coverage has treated the ruling as the proximate trigger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translation from Spanish to English:<\/strong>\u00a0\u201cIV. Accordingly, the question raised in the order admitting the appeal must be answered as follows: the Tenth Additional Provision of the Immigration Law cannot be applied to persons intercepted at sea while attempting to swim into the cities of Ceuta and Melilla; consequently, such persons must not be subjected to the border-rejection procedure, but rather to the return procedure.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The ruling explains how a crossing on this scale became possible, but not why the border was opened at that particular moment. By then, a coordinated social media campaign was already in place, Morocco had recalled its ambassador, and six months of pressure had drawn Ceuta\u2019s sovereignty into Spain\u2019s positions on Iran, Gaza and NATO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The crowd that gathered online<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The people who crossed were overwhelmingly young men, rather than the mixed population of families typically associated with migration crises. Many had responded to\u00a0false social-media and <\/a>W<\/a>hatsApp claims<\/a>\u00a0that Spain had opened the border, amplified through public Facebook groups including Hraga Ceuta and Haraga_ceuta. The mobilisation began online, not at the border.\u00a0Meta subsequently shut down five Facebook groups<\/a>\u00a0with more than 230,000 members between them, where users exchanged routes, equipment information, telephone numbers and other logistical details. Before the mass crossing,\u00a0CeutaTV documented Hraga Ceuta<\/a>, then numbering more than 20,000 members, sharing Google Maps measurements around the Tarajal breakwater, advertisements for diving fins, information about sea conditions and requests for companions with whom to attempt the crossing.\u00a0Brussels Signal independently documented the same material<\/a>, including swimming distances, wetsuits, diving fins, taxi routes to the frontier and the false claim that the border had opened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time the first swimmers reached the water, the rumour had already done its work. Thousands had been given the same message, shown the same routes and told what equipment they would need. What followed at the border had been gathering for days in plain sight online. The question is no longer simply how the crossing spread, but why the conditions described online coincided so closely with those encountered at the border.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was not the first time Rabat had used migration pressure as diplomatic leverage. During a May 2021 dispute triggered by Spain\u2019s decision to admit Polisario Front leader Brahim Ghali for medical treatment,\u00a0Moroccan authorities appeared to relax border controls<\/a>, allowing roughly 8,000 people to enter Ceuta over two days. After the crossing began and Madrid summoned Morocco\u2019s ambassador to protest,\u00a0Rabat recalled Ambassador Karima Benyaich<\/a>\u00a0for consultations.\u00a0Al Jazeera\u2019s 2026 analysis<\/a>\u00a0invoked that episode as the precedent for interpreting the July 2026 crossing as another possible attempt to pressure Spain.\u00a0That episode echoed May 2021, when\u00a0Reuters<\/a>\u00a0and others reported that Moroccan authorities had previously eased controls during a diplomatic rupture, widely read as retaliation over Spain\u2019s decision to let the Western Sahara independence movement\u2019s ailing leader receive hospital treatment on Spanish soil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both\u00a0Le Monde<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0The Guardian<\/a>\u00a0raised the possibility that Rabat loosened its controls to register displeasure at S\u00e1nchez\u2019s visit to Algeria, Morocco\u2019s principal regional rival. The visit restored high-level political ties and sought additional Algerian gas through\u00a0Medgaz<\/a>, the direct undersea pipeline to Spain that bypasses Morocco. The grievance, then, was not lost transit revenue but Madrid\u2019s renewed strategic partnership with Algiers<\/p>\n\n\n\n VIDEO: RTVE documented the May 2021 crossing at Tarajal.(Source:\u00a0RT<\/a>V<\/a>E Noticias<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n To resume, we have identified two border openings, five years apart, followed by Spanish decisions Rabat opposed, and in both cases, Morocco withheld the enforcement it routinely used to stop departures, turning migration into an instrument of state pressure against Madrid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Israel publicly maintained its distance from Morocco\u2019s territorial claims. In late April, its ambassador in Madrid,\u00a0Dana Erlich, said<\/a>\u00a0that her government was \u201cnot thinking about\u201d supporting Rabat\u2019s claims to Ceuta and Melilla, calling the issue irrelevant to Israel\u2019s immediate priorities. The denial was narrowly framed around the government\u2019s position at that moment and did not address the wider political and military alignment between Israel and Morocco. When Danny Danon subsequently described the cities as \u201ccolonial enclaves,\u201d Israel could portray his intervention as the personal position of a politician with a long record of challenging Netanyahu.\u00a0Netanyahu fired Danon<\/a>\u00a0as deputy defence minister in 2014 after he publicly criticized the government\u2019s Gaza strategy, and\u00a0Danon challenged Netanyahu<\/a>\u00a0for the Likud leadership in 2007 and 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy.<\/p> Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it\u2019s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in\u2026<\/p>\u2014 Danny Danon \ud83c\uddee\ud83c\uddf1 \u05d3\u05e0\u05d9 \u05d3\u05e0\u05d5\u05df (@dannydanon) July 30, 2026<\/a><\/blockquote>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Yet distancing the government from Danon\u2019s wording does not answer the central issue raised by this investigation. His intervention amplified a campaign already being advanced by Morocco\u2019s advocates in Washington and unfolded alongside deepening Israeli\u2013Moroccan military cooperation, allowing Israel to deny a formal policy while one of its most prominent diplomats reinforced the same pressure on Spain<\/p>\n\n\n\n The strait nobody wanted to talk about<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ceuta sits beside the Strait of Gibraltar, a corridor Washington has treated as a strategic artery for decades. A\u00a0declassified State Department record<\/a>\u00a0called Gibraltar \u201cthe most important strait in the world\u201d and warned that Spanish resistance to free transit threatened the strategic mobility underpinning Western defence. A\u00a0Justice Department-filed account of US\u2013Gibraltar relations<\/a>\u00a0documents Gibraltar\u2019s use by American ships during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, by reserve vessels refuelling en route to the Middle East, and by US attack submarines during the 2011 intervention in Libya.<\/p>\n\n\n\n American strategic writing has likewise identified Gibraltar as a vital Mediterranean port for US nuclear-powered submarines, arguing that British control protects Washington\u2019s access from the political restrictions Spanish sovereignty could impose. Ceuta lies on the opposite shore of that same passage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its sovereignty is therefore not a peripheral dispute at Europe\u2019s southern edge, but part of the political geography surrounding a corridor central to American military movement between the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Pressure on Ceuta cannot be separated from the strategic waterway beside it, or from the interests of the powers that depend on keeping it open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A border that belongs to more than Spain<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n If Ceuta were threatened militarily, Spain would defend it as sovereign territory. The legal and strategic reality, however, is more complicated.\u00a0NATO\u2019s founding treaty<\/a>\u00a0limits Article 5\u2019s geographical scope to member territories in Europe and North America, Turkey and qualifying North Atlantic islands, leaving Ceuta and Melilla outside its explicit collective-defence guarantee. Any allied response would therefore depend on a political decision reached by consensus rather than an unambiguous treaty obligation. Rubin, D\u00edaz-Balart, Ayoub and others built their arguments around that vulnerability opportunistically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Consequently, Ceuta\u00a0 offered a way to challenge Spanish sovereignty, strain Madrid\u2019s military resources and expose divisions inside NATO without directly confronting continental Spain, whose collective defence was clearly guaranteed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What the record shows<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n By July 30, the conditions for pressuring Spain over Gaza and Iran had been assembled for years, in public and by name.\u00a0Yair Netanyahu proposed the trade in 2019<\/a>.\u00a0Ben Gvir rehearsed the use of migration as punishment in 2025<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0repeated it during the crossing<\/a>\u00a0itself.\u00a0Rubin then described the method that appeared on the ground<\/a>, calling for an unarmed mass movement into Ceuta under the protection of NATO\u2019s territorial ambiguity. Six weeks later, D\u00edaz-Balart placed Morocco\u2019s claim inside an\u00a0official congressional report<\/a>, while Lindsey Graham, Robert Greenway and a leaked Pentagon planning document carried the campaign from the think-tank circuit into the machinery of American power.\u00a0Netanyahu\u2019s government warned<\/a>\u00a0that Spain would pay an \u201cimmediate price,\u201d as Israel and Morocco entered 2026 with a\u00a0signed military work plan<\/a>\u00a0and an Israeli Barak MX air-defence battery deployed at Sidi Yahya, roughly 200 kilometres southwest of Ceuta.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the border opened, and Morocco controlled the gate, while Washington and Jerusalem had the surveillance capacity to see the crowd gathering, the strategic relationships to understand what Rabat was doing and every reason to recognise the pressure it placed on Madrid. Yet neither condemned Morocco. Their anger remained fixed on Spain, while Israeli officials used the crossing to repeat the same arguments about migration, Gaza and Moroccan sovereignty that had preceded it. The event followed the script too closely to be dismissed as an unrelated border failure. Spain had been threatened, the method published, and Morocco already possessed the lever and security architecture when the promised pressure arrived at the precise point where Spanish territory was most exposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coordination does not always leave behind a signed order; in fact, States working through convergent interests rarely need one. What they need is a shared target, compatible motives, an available instrument and confidence that the others will not interfere. By July 2026, Washington, Jerusalem and Rabat had all four.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The crowd that entered Ceuta carried more than the momentum of the crossing. It was the physical expression of a pressure campaign that had already been written, promoted and carried into official policy before the first person reached the fence.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n READ MORE EU NEWS AT:\u00a021st CENTURY WIRE EU FILES<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM \u2013\u00a0BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.activistpost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image-1-145.jpg\")
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