The main underlying issue is “control over the Strait of Gibraltar,” since at the present time the straits around the world “are part of the critical chain of a world at war”.
Almost a month after the migrant invasion of Ceuta, tensions continues to simmer in the Western Mediterranean. During the early hours of Wednesday morning 12 Moroccans were arrested for stoning a small group of Spanish soldiers. According to a report in 20 Minutos, the events occurred at around 5:30 a.m., when the Spanish troops were on their way to a surveillance point established in the Benzú area:
Upon arriving at the scene, several individuals came out from different points and surrounded the jeep in which the soldiers were riding. The same sources have indicated that the group began to throw stones at the car, causing considerable damage.
Faced with the intensity of the attack, the four soldiers abandoned the vehicle and fled on foot to safety. During the chase, which continued in the direction of Calamocarro, the troops continued to be pelted by stones and suffered injuries and contusions. The military managed to alert the emergency services, and a unit of National Police officers and Civil Guards were called out.
The incident invites a number of questions.
Were the dozen or so stone Moroccan throwers simply aggrieved migrants who took advantage of the moment, or were they agents of the Moroccan performing another escalatory move in Morocco’s hybrid war against Spain? Could the Spanish soldiers have responded differently, or did their rules of engagement forbid the use of gunfire against civilians? If they had responded with gunfire against the stone throwers, in pure IDF fashion, what would the fallout have been?
The attack came hours after hundreds of Ceuta residents attacked migrants who have been camping on the beach of El Trampolín for the past 26 days. Since the migrant invasion of Ceuta during the last days of July, thousands of the roughly 70,000 migrants who made the incursion have stayed behind. Many of them are minors or from third countries in Africa.
As La Voz de Galicia reports, the mood on the streets of Ceuta suggests that a growing cohort of the Spanish enclave’s civil society is losing calm and patience (though one has to wonder how many of the demonstrators are agitators from other parts of Spain brought in to intensify tensions):
A column of 200 of these demonstrators, according to calculations by the National Police, tried to reach the Trampolín beach to mete out their own form of punishments. But they were warded off by warning shots from security forces.
As Brussels Signal notes, Ceuta’s government has asked Madrid to remove the camp on El Trampolín. Spain’s far right-wing party, Vox, arguably the biggest political beneficiary of the Ceuta border crisis, has also demanded the same.
Officers moved more than 1,200 people off the beach on August 20 to clean it. Hundreds returned within hours and the settlement was rebuilt.
Force has now been used at the site on consecutive days. On August 25 police charged and fired rubber bullets to disperse migrants during a Red Cross food distribution.
The march that preceded the beach confrontation drew more than 2,000 people. It began in the O’Donnell district, outside the military hospital, and grew as it moved on the Government Delegation, where the state’s crisis committee was meeting inside.
Demonstrators carried Spanish and Ceuta flags and called for the removal of the migrants and the resignation of the government delegate, Miguel Ángel Pérez Triano. It was the second such protest in two days in a city of about 84,000 people.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez government is still struggling to get to grips with the crisis. Under pressure from both the EU and Spain’s right-wing opposition, his government has approved modifications to the Asylum and Foreigners laws aimed at speeding up expulsions of undocumented migrants.
The Spanish Commission for Refugee Aid (CEAR) has warned that the reforms are not only “regressive” but are “in line with the countries with the most restrictive [immigration] policies in the EU” and are even “tougher than those required” by the European Pact on Migration and Asylum.
IDEA OF SPREADING MIGRANTS AROUND
There is still no clear political consensus on what actually caused roughly 70,000 migrants to cross over into Ceuta in little over 24 hours. The only thing that the government and opposition parties seem to agree on is that the Kingdom of Morocco bears no responsibility for what happened.
This sharply diverges from our own reading. As we noted in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, the Kingdom of Morocco has a history of using migration within so-called “hybrid operations” as a tool of pressure against Spain. We also noted that the Kingdom could be working in tandem with two very powerful allies — the United States and Israel:
While there is, for the moment, no smoking gun, both countries have motives aplenty for attacking Spain. The Sánchez administration is one of the only European governments to have strongly opposed and condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza, with full public support.
Sanchez has also pursued a policy of closer ties and economic cooperation with China, which also runs counter to general EU policy. Perhaps most importantly, Sánchez refused to let the US military use its joint bases in Spain to wage war against Iran.
As we have mentioned before, this is primarily a matter of political survival for Sánchez. Elections are coming next year and as the corruption scandals involving senior figures in his party, including family members, have multiplied, he has decided, quite astutely, that his best form of defence is to pursue policies that are broadly popular with voters.
But in the process, he’s made two very powerful enemies in the US and Israel’s Trump and Netanyahu governments. As Juan David Rojas writes for Unheard, “MAGA has branded Spain Public Enemy No. 1 over its government’s strident posture towards the US and Israel during the Iran war.”
This is far from a fringe view, though it is one that is not being entertained by Spain’s political establishment — at least not openly. By contrast, a theory is graining ground in academic and intelligence circles in China, which has forged close economic ties with both Spain and Morocco, that Israel’s Mossad played a role in instigating the migrant invasion. From El Mundo America:
What if the massive arrival of migrants in Ceuta is part of an Intelligence operation driven by Morocco and Israel to destabilize Spain? This is the theory gaining ground in some academic and Chinese Intelligence circles. Beijing officials have shared with this newspaper their perspective on how the second world power has viewed the migration crisis in the Spanish autonomous city.
This week, Egyptian political scientist Nadia Helmy, an expert in Chinese politics and Sino-Israeli relations, openly presented this thesis in an article published by Modern Diplomacy, an international magazine specializing in geopolitical analysis. The author argues that some reports from Beijing interpret the events in Ceuta as a hybrid warfare operation aimed at increasing pressure on Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government. According to this interpretation, the maneuver would have involved Mossad, the Israeli Intelligence service, interested in promoting a destabilization campaign against Spain…
“Chinese Intelligence analysis centers have examined the escalation of diplomatic and political tensions between Spain and Israel. From that perspective, the deterioration of bilateral relations could have motivated Mossad to get involved in the migration crisis between Morocco and Spain, exacerbating the situation and infiltrating agents to foster discontent and chaos among the Moroccan population,” Helmy explains.
In recent days, hacktivist group JBT2026 (Jabaroot) claims to have exfiltrated a database containing records of approximately 70,000 Moroccan intelligence and security personnel, including names, dates of birth, national identity card (CIN) numbers, recruitment years, ranks, PPR personnel numbers, and bank account details (RIB). The group says it published the list as a gift to Spanish authorities after the latest migration crisis.
🚨Cyber Alert ‼️
🇲🇦Morocco – Jabaroot Claims Breach of Moroccan Intelligence Services, Exposing Data of 70,000 Personnel
The hacktivist group JBT2026 (Jabaroot) claims to have breached Morocco’s General Directorate for Territorial Surveillance (DGST) and General Directorate of… pic.twitter.com/LApzWLphtn
— Hackmanac (@H4ckmanac) August 25, 2026
Jabaroot, the hackers who revealed the list of Moroccan #DGST agents, are “four Moroccan officers and a police commissioner who broke with the ‘service’ and went into exile in Europe, and who are calling for changes at the helm of the kingdom’s security institutions,” according…
— Ignacio Cembrero (@icembrero) August 26, 2026
“Jabaroot’s great gift to Europe, and especially to Spain,” states one of the messages that accompany the leak, first broken by Spain’s El Confidencial. The leak, the hactivists said, exposes “70,000 agents of Moroccan intelligence and security services, who travelled around Europe carrying out the dirtiest intelligence missions, such as espionage, installation of listening devices and bribery of politicians and businessmen”.
Jabaroot fingers Abdellatif Hammouchi, a senior official of the DGDT (internal intelligence) and the DGSN (the police), and Fouad Ali el Himma, the main royal advisor, as the two main culprits behind the July 30 migrant invasion.
“They are the ones who have planned the attack to put Spain in a difficult situation. Everything happened with the knowledge of a large country and another fictitious state,” the hackers explain, referring to the US and Israel.
Jabaroot does not intend to stop there and has promised to publish another list with the specific names of those who “orchestrated and coordinated the Ceuta plan”. The hakctivists claim to have copies of the orders issued to “the agents who travelled to Fnideq (Castillejos) before and during the events.”
In the Sánchez government’s view, the invasion was the result of “foreign interference” via social media aimed at dividing the European Union. Internal reports, according to various government sources cited by El Español, insist there is no indication of hostile action by Rabat towards Spain:
“There are no indications that it was a hybrid attack related to its claim to Ceuta and Melilla, but there are indications about the use of social networks to divide and destabilise the EU by stirring up the anti-immigration current,” say government sources.
That is why they add that there has not been a single public reproach or insinuation by any member of the Spanish government towards Morocco.
They explain that a similar incident occurred in 2021, although smaller in number of people involved, but with differences related to Morocco’s performance.
Then there was a “communication breakdown” between Madrid and Rabat as soon as the incident began, while now that relationship was maintained intensely with collaboration between the two governments, always according to sources in the Spanish government.
Guess who’s getting most of the blame for the social media activity, according to El Español?
In those days there were messages on social media in other countries about this intense activity. For example, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha wrote on X that “We have detected an intense Russian propaganda campaign across Europe that uses images of Ceuta to sow destabilization.”
The tweet in question…
We have detected an intensive Russian propaganda campaign across Europe using pictures from Ceuta to sow destabilization.
There have been more than 1,500 publications on outlets identified by analysts as a pro-Russian network, led by Pravda and RT. Pravda Spanish has posted… pic.twitter.com/lpy2GLPBXU
— Andrii Sybiha 🇺🇦 (@andrii_sybiha) July 31, 2026
For its part, Spain’s two main opposition parties, the People’s Party and Vox, place all the blame on the Pedro Sánchez government while downplaying any possible role played by Rabat, Washington or Tel Aviv.
In response to my previous post on this issue, Did the US and Israel Just Commit Their First Act of Hybrid War Against Spain?, NC reader PCA pointed out that while the Moroccan State is poorly viewed by many Spaniards (across both aisles of the political spectrum), it is able to extract concessions from the Spanish government because it knows that Spain can’t afford to walk away from having a good relationship with either Morocco or Algeria.
The latter is Spain’s [biggest] gas supplier, whereas the former is its main partner when it comes to containing illegal migration via Ceuta, Melilla and the Canary Islands, as well as dealing with Islamic terrorism.
What’s more,… [Morocco has] captured many members of the Spanish Socialist Party who were previously in favour of Western Sahara’s autonomy (e.g. Pepe Blanco, Jose Bono, Trinidad Jimenez, etc) through lobbying. And many Spanish MNCs have interests in Morocco, which makes many politicians reluctant to even call them out by name (see the latest statement of former minister Ana Palacio, who’s on the board of numerous utilities firms, as an example). This all makes it very difficult for a Spanish government of any persuasion to call out Morocco’s actions, as they’d irritate both their leadership and the economic elite at home.
Last but not least, and this is never brought up in the media for obvious reasons, many people in Spain believe that the Moroccan state holds plenty of kompromat over Sánchez and… many Spanish politicians and that they use this to ensure that the political class remains quiet and generally obedient when it comes to dealing with the former’s hegemonic aspirations throughout the Western Mediterranean. The Pegasus spyware scandal points in this direction.
Finally, Vox are walking a tight line because they want to improve relations with the US and Israel, but they know that their base distrusts Israel and is willing to punish them for anything that they can be seen as kowtowing to the two countries (see for example their drop in popularity since the onset of the Iran war). Their supporters on social media say that they believe the US and Israel were involved in the hybrid attack, and they don’t like the party’s closeness with the AngloZionist gang.
Speaking of the AngloZionist gang, Ceuta received a visit yesterday from former Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, who was there no doubt to add further fuel to the fire. FAES, the foundation chaired by Aznar, has lambasted Pedro Sánchez’s government for its mismanagement of the crisis, in particular its lack of preparation and excessively complacent policy towards Rabat.
Readers may remember Aznar as the “third man” at the 2003 Azores Summit, where George W Bush, Tony Blair and Aznar issued a final 24-hour ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein before the invasion of Iraq. Like Blair and Bush, Aznar is fervently pro-Israel. Last year, at the height of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Aznar said that Israel must win in the Middle East in order to save the West.
Shortly before Aznar gave his speech, several citizens rebuked the former prime minister for his role in the Iraq war: “Murderer, you are a son of a bitch! You’re a murderer, in the Iraq war, get out!”
Other residents chanted his name while also calling for help and the removal of the Moroccan invaders. Aznar did not miss the opportunity to call for a complete change of government in Spain. This is almost certainly the primary goal of Israel and the US in the first phase of this hybrid war: to trigger the collapse of Pedro Sánchez, the most prominent critic of Israel’s war crimes and the disastrous US-Israeli war in Iran among European leaders.
To that effect, social media has been awash in disinformation, including claims that Sánchez is holidaying in Andorra as the crisis in Ceuta intensifies. However, as many commentators have pointed out, the main source of that claim, a photo of Sánchez on a ski lift, has a time stamp reading August 31st, which is three days in the future. In other words, it’s from the past — specifically late August 2024.
But that didn’t stop mainstream media outlets, including even Spain’s public broadcaster, RTVE, from covering the story as if it were true. If this is indeed a regime change operation, everybody appears to be chipping in. Sánchez himself is hardly helping matters by defending the Kingdom of Morocco, the main antagonist in this hybrid war against Spain, at every turn.
“You don’t have to be a genius to realise that Ceuta could end up costing Pedro Sánchez his prime-ministership,” warns Enric Juliana, the assistant director of La Vanguardia, Catalonia’s leading newspaper. According to Juliana, the main underlying issue in the short to medium term is “control over the Strait of Gibraltar,” since at the present time the straits around the world “are part of the critical chain of a world at war”.
