The official death toll from a mass border crossing into the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta has risen to at least 72, local authorities said Sunday, as Morocco and Spain faced growing pressure to explain how tens of thousands of people managed to force their way into European territory in a matter of days. But the real number may be higher.
According to AFP, Ceuta’s local government delegate, Miguel Angel Perez Triano, confirmed the updated figure to reporters, up from a previous count of 67. AFP reported that most of the victims drowned while trying to swim around a breakwater barrier separating Morocco from the tiny Spanish territory on the North African coast.
The surge began late last week, when tens of thousands of people, mostly young Moroccans, swarmed past a Moroccan border checkpoint near the city of Fnideq and either swam or waded into Ceuta. Spanish officials estimated roughly 60,000 people crossed over a 24-to-48-hour span, one of the largest such incidents on record at the border.
Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said this weekend that the situation had been “almost entirely reversed,” with the vast majority of those who entered Ceuta already sent back across the border into Morocco. Spanish authorities credited close coordination with Moroccan security forces for the rapid turnaround, and announced plans to install a roughly 500-meter containment barrier along the sea border near the Tarajal breakwater, the stretch of coastline where much of the crossing — and many of the deaths — occurred.
Moroccan authorities, however, have remained silent and so far and offered little public explanation for the incident. Rabat has not commented on the death toll or on arrests made after clashes broke out Friday between Moroccan police and young migrants near the boarder.
That silence has drawn sharp criticism from rights groups. The Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) said it had documented close to 130 deaths, along with dozens of people still missing, and called for an independent investigation into what it described as an unprecedented surge in migration attempts, AFP reported. The group accused Moroccan officials of a troubling silence that, in its view, allowed the crisis to unfold. AFP also cited a source close to advocacy circles who suggested the scale and coordination of the crossing made it unlikely to have happened without at least tacit approval from Moroccan authorities.
Earlier reporting from the Associated Press and NPR traced the crisis as it escalated over several days. What began as a noticeable uptick in crossings in late July — with roughly 1,500 arrivals recorded between July 20 and 29 — exploded into a mass breach by July 30, when the first deaths, then numbering in the teens, were reported. By Friday, August 1, Spain’s government had raised the toll to 57 and then 67, as bodies continued to be recovered from the water and from the crush of people trying to scale the breakwater fence. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez traveled to Ceuta as the crisis peaked, calling the mass crossing a violation of Spanish sovereignty and pledging to speed up returns to Morocco.
There were chaotic scenes in Ceuta, with unaccompanied minors and other migrants sleeping in parks and on sidewalks as authorities scrambled to process the influx. Some of the dead were reported to have been crushed in stampedes at the breakwater rather than drowned, according to Spanish officials cited by multiple outlets.
Ceuta and its sister enclave, Melilla, are the only land borders between Africa and the European Union, making both frequent flashpoints for irregular migration. A comparable but far smaller incident occurred in 2021, when between 6,000 and 9,000 people crossed into Ceuta over several months, with two confirmed deaths, according to prior records of border incidents in the area. This weekend’s toll, by contrast, ranks among the deadliest single episodes at the Ceuta-Morocco frontier in recent memory.
As of Sunday, Spanish officials said an evaluation of the events would need to involve both governments, while Moroccan authorities had yet to issue a formal accounting of the deaths, arrests, or the circumstances that allowed such a large group to reach the border in the first place.
