Ceuta and Melilla

In the final days of July 2026, tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco into Spain's North African enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in the span of roughly a day. The crisis arrived at the intersection of a five hundred year old territorial dispute, a House vote in Washington nobody outside a handful of observers noticed, a seven year old post from the Israeli prime minister's son, and Spain's own break with Israel over Gaza. What follows is a factual account of each of those threads, sourced and attributed, with my own view reserved for the close and clearly marked as such.

What Happened

In the final days of July 2026, an estimated 60,000 people, most of them young men, crossed the border from Morocco into the Spanish autonomous city of Ceuta.⁸ Smaller numbers attempted the same crossing roughly 250 miles away in Melilla, the other Spanish enclave on Morocco's Mediterranean coast. Most entered by swimming around the Tarajal and Benzu breakwaters or by moving along the shoreline on foot.⁸ It happened over the course of roughly twenty four hours starting Thursday, July 30.

By the following Saturday, Spanish officials said that around 50,000 of those who crossed had voluntarily returned to Morocco, and Spain's interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told reporters the situation had been "almost entirely reversed."⁹ That reversal did not come without cost. At least 67 people died in the crossing, some by drowning and others in a stampede at the breakwater barrier, though some reports put the toll higher; Sky News cited local officials putting the number at 86, and diving teams from the Guardia Civil and Salvamento Maritimo continued searching the coastline for bodies in the days that followed.⁸

Spanish authorities have pointed to a specific legal trigger for the timing of the surge. On June 29, 2026, Spain's Supreme Court ruled that authorities could not summarily return migrants who arrive in Ceuta and Melilla by sea without first affording them due process.⁷ The ruling did not legalize irregular entry or guarantee that anyone who swam across could stay in Spain, and it did not apply to migrants entering by land, including those who climb the border fence. Spain's Interior Ministry said human trafficking networks exploited the ruling to encourage the flow, and Spanish broadcaster RTVE reported that news of the ruling spread on Moroccan social media in the days before the crossing began.⁷

The numbers for Ceuta specifically stand out against the broader national picture. Irregular arrivals across all of Spain actually fell from 17,990 in the first half of 2025 to 12,138 in the same period of 2026. Ceuta alone saw land arrivals jump from 978 in that window last year to 2,582 this year, an increase of 164 percent, according to Spain's Interior Ministry.¹⁰

The political reaction was immediate. President Trump called the scenes "terrible," and Vice President Vance pointed to them as evidence of the consequences of mass migration. The U.S. State Department expressed support for Spain's sovereignty over the territories. Twenty two European Union heads of state sent a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen citing Spain's April 2026 mass regularization announcement, under which 1.2 million migrants applied for legal status, as a "pull factor" behind the crisis.⁸ Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni temporarily suspended the Schengen free movement agreement for air and sea travel from Spain.¹⁵

Five Centuries of Contested Sovereignty

To understand why two small cities on the North African coast are at the center of a geopolitical argument in 2026, it helps to go back more than 500 years.

Ceuta's modern European history begins in 1415, when Portuguese forces under King John I conquered the city from the Marinid Sultanate, a conquest significant enough that historians generally mark it as the beginning of the Portuguese Empire.² Ceuta sits directly on the Strait of Gibraltar, and its strategic value was already understood in antiquity: in 711, the city had served as a launching point for the Umayyad conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, the event that began nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule in what is now Spain and Portugal.² Portugal held Ceuta for over two centuries, fighting off a Marinid siege in 1419 to keep it.

Melilla's history under European control began later. In 1497, five years after the fall of Granada ended the Reconquista, the Duke of Medina Sidonia sent a naval commander named Pedro de Estopinan to seize the city on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. He took it with almost no resistance, and a Moroccan attempt to retake it shortly after was repelled by cannon fire from Spanish ships offshore.¹ Melilla was incorporated into the Crown of Castile and has remained under Spanish sovereignty ever since.

Ceuta's path to Spanish control came later and by a different route. In 1580, the crowns of Spain and Portugal were united under a single monarch during the period known as the Iberian Union, and Ceuta fell under Spanish authority as part of that union. When Portugal restored its independence in 1640, Ceuta did not go with it. It remained under Spanish administration, and that arrangement was formally recognized in the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668.³ Morocco has never accepted that treaty as settling the question of sovereignty, on the grounds that it was negotiated between Spain and Portugal without Moroccan participation.⁴

Both cities have remained Spanish for centuries since, including through the era of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco from 1912 to 1956. When Morocco gained independence in 1956, Spain returned most of the territory it had held under that protectorate but kept Ceuta, Melilla, and several smaller offshore islands, known collectively as the plazas de soberania.³ Morocco does not recognize Spanish sovereignty over these territories and considers them part of an unfinished decolonization process. Spain, for its part, treats Ceuta and Melilla as full and integral parts of the Spanish nation, legally and constitutionally no different from Madrid or Barcelona.

Why the Strait Matters

The dispute is not simply about land. Ceuta and Melilla sit on one of the most consequential maritime chokepoints in the world. The Strait of Gibraltar is the only water passage connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, and an enormous volume of global shipping traffic, including oil and container traffic bound for European and North African ports, passes through it.⁵ Control of territory directly on that strait has carried outsized military and economic weight for as long as ships have needed to move between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, which is part of why both Portugal and Spain fought to hold Ceuta specifically rather than settling for outposts further down the coast.

Today, Ceuta and Melilla carry a second layer of significance beyond the strait itself: they are the only land borders the European Union shares with the African continent.⁷ That single fact is what makes them a recurring flashpoint for migration, since they represent the only place someone can walk from Africa into EU territory without crossing open water to reach the Spanish or Italian mainland.

That combination, five centuries of contested sovereignty layered on top of one of the world's most important shipping chokepoints and the EU's only African land border, is the backdrop against which everything else in this piece happened.

Thomas Massie's Claim, and the House Vote Behind It

In the same week the Ceuta crisis was unfolding, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie posted on X accusing his own party of manufactured outrage. His post read: "Don't fall for the fake Fox/GOP outrage. Two weeks ago the House passed a bill that greenlighted the transfer of Spanish territory to Morocco. Every Republican except me voted for it, but now THEY are acting shocked at the invasion."¹²

The bill Massie referenced is H.R. 8595, the National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2027, a $47.32 billion fiscal year 2027 State Department spending package.¹³ It passed the House on July 15, 2026, by a vote of 217 to 209. Massie was the only Republican to vote no. Most Democrats voted against the bill as well, for reasons tied to the broader spending package rather than this specific provision.¹²

What is contested is not the vote itself, but what the bill's language means and what it did or did not do.

Massie's position is that a bill accompanied by language favorable to Morocco's territorial claim, passed nearly unanimously by his own party, undercuts the party's ability to express shock at a crisis rooted in that same territorial dispute two weeks later. In further posts, Massie pointed to $40 million in assistance to Morocco included in the same bill, and tied the vote to Spain's broader posture toward Israel, writing: "Spain denounces Israel, Bibi Netanyahu and refuses to participate in war against Iran. Then the U.S. government and Israel immediately team up with Morocco to advocate for the invasion of Spanish territory."¹¹

Critics of Massie's framing point to a specific textual distinction. According to reporting that reviewed the bill and its accompanying committee report directly, the report "notes" that Ceuta and Melilla sit in territory Morocco claims and "supports" continued diplomatic talks between Morocco and Spain over their status. The bill's actual statutory text contains no language about Morocco, Spain, Ceuta, or Melilla at all.¹³ The Congressional Research Service has stated that appropriations report language is generally not legally binding in the way statutory text is, though federal agencies do treat it seriously as an expression of congressional intent. The Ceuta paragraph is also not among the specific report provisions incorporated into the bill through Section 7019, which does bind certain funding tables and reporting requirements.¹³ On that basis, critics argue "greenlighted the transfer" overstates what a non-binding committee report can legally do, since it does not transfer sovereignty or recognize Moroccan ownership.¹⁴

Both readings rest on facts that check out. The vote happened as described, and Massie was the lone Republican no. The report does contain language favorable to Morocco's position. Where the two sides diverge is on how much weight a non-binding report carries, and by extension, how fair it is to describe supporting that report as "greenlighting" anything. That is a judgment about political meaning rather than a dispute over what happened, and it is presented here with both positions attributed to the people making them.

Yair Netanyahu's 2019 Post

In May 2019, Yair Netanyahu, the eldest son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted on Twitter addressing "Arabs and Muslims" directly. The post read: "Dear Arabs and Muslims. Want to free occupied Arab Islamic lands? Here's a good start!" The post included a map highlighting Ceuta and Melilla as occupied territory.¹⁶

The post drew an immediate response from Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain's Vox party, who called Netanyahu "ignorant and frivolous," writing that Spain had been invaded by Islamist forces and had recovered the territory after an eight century Reconquista.¹⁷

Netanyahu did not walk the post back. He responded directly to Abascal, writing: "Dear Spanish people. I see you all got upset. Ceuta and Melilla are tiny territories you own across the sea on another continent. Now imagine how we feel when your government calls for Israel to give away Judea and Samaria (West Bank), which is the Jewish heartland." He went on to describe Judea and Samaria as the Jewish people's birthplace referenced in the Bible, located near Tel Aviv and cutting through Jerusalem, and comparable in size to Palma de Mallorca.¹⁵

Netanyahu then proposed what he framed as a reciprocal arrangement, writing: "Let's make a deal, we won't fund NGOs in your country calling you to give away Ceuta and Melilla, and you will stop funding NGOs in our country that calls us to give away Judea and Samaria."¹⁵ That line is significant because it was Netanyahu himself, in 2019, who first raised the idea of NGO funding tied to Ceuta and Melilla's status, a detail that has taken on new weight given how the current crisis has unfolded.

The 2019 exchange had largely faded from public attention until this past week, when it resurfaced widely on social media alongside coverage of the Ceuta crisis. Commentators sharing the old post have asked why Netanyahu's son was calling for Arabs and Muslims to "free" Ceuta in 2019, years before the current migration surge, if the recent crisis is solely a function of Spain's present day political alignment against Israel.¹⁸ Separately, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, posted on X this year that Spain "should explain to the world why it maintains colonial enclaves in Africa," a comment that has also been read alongside the resurfaced 2019 thread.¹⁹

It is worth being precise about what the 2019 record does and does not establish. It shows that Yair Netanyahu, a private citizen and the son of Israel's prime minister rather than an Israeli government official himself, publicly called for Ceuta and Melilla's "liberation" and floated the idea of NGO funding tied to that goal, seven years before the current crisis. It does not, on its own, establish that the Israeli government funded or organized anything connected to the July 2026 crossing. Those are two separate claims, and only the first is documented by the 2019 posts themselves.

Pedro Sanchez's Posture Toward Israel

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has spent the past several years positioning himself as one of the most vocal critics of Israel among world leaders. In September 2025, Sanchez announced a package of measures against Israel over its conduct in Gaza, describing the war in stark terms: "This is not self-defence, it's not even an attack, it's the extermination of a defenceless people. It is a violation of all humanitarian laws, and despite that, the international community is failing to stop this tragedy." He also said, "There is a difference between defending your country and bombing hospitals or starving innocent children."²⁰

Those measures included a full arms embargo, a ban on ships carrying fuel for the Israeli military from docking at Spanish ports, a denial of Spanish airspace to aircraft transporting Israeli defense material, an embargo on goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and increased humanitarian aid to Gaza and the Palestinian Authority.²⁰ Spain's Parliament formally enshrined the arms embargo into law on October 8, 2025, in a vote of 178 to 169, with support from the smaller Podemos party helping the governing coalition secure passage. The law's preamble states that Israel's response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack "ended up becoming an indiscriminate attack against the Palestinian population that the majority of experts have called genocide."²¹

Sanchez's government has also called for Israel to be banned from international sporting events over the war, and Spain has recognized the state of Palestine. Spain's political right, including the People's Party and Vox, has criticized Sanchez's approach, though that criticism has centered more on domestic political alignment than on offering an alternative account of the war itself.

What Moroccan Control Would Mean

This is the backdrop against which questions about Ceuta and Melilla's future status have to be read. Spain, under Sanchez, has taken one of the harder diplomatic lines against Israel of any Western European government. Morocco, meanwhile, has normalized relations with Israel through the 2020 Abraham Accords framework and has an increasingly close security and defense relationship with Israel, a dynamic separate from anything to do with Ceuta or Melilla but relevant to understanding who the interested parties are.

What would it actually mean if Morocco gained control of Ceuta and Melilla? Strategically, it would hand Rabat direct control of territory sitting on the Strait of Gibraltar, the only water passage between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. It would end Spain's centuries long physical presence on the African continent and eliminate the EU's only land border with Africa as currently configured. For Morocco, gaining the cities would also fit into a broader diplomatic strategy: Morocco's primary foreign policy goal in the region is international recognition of its claimed sovereignty over Western Sahara, a territory it has controlled since Spain's 1975 withdrawal but which remains contested by the Algeria backed Polisario Front. Morocco has previously used loosened border enforcement at Ceuta and Melilla as leverage in disputes with Spain, including during a 2021 crisis, and analysts have noted that eased crossings have historically tracked with moments of friction, such as Spanish outreach to Algeria, Morocco's regional rival and a major gas supplier to southern Europe.⁶

Whether any of that connects to the current crisis in a direct, coordinated way is a separate and unproven question. Online commentary following the July 2026 crossing has included claims that Israel or Israeli aligned think tanks encouraged Morocco to pressure Spain as retaliation for Sanchez's stance on Gaza, and some analysts have pointed to earlier 2026 commentary in which pro-Israel analysts argued Israel should help Morocco pressure Spain over Ceuta specifically because of Spain's support for Palestinians.¹⁸ That theory has circulated widely, but it remains an argument made by specific commentators and analysts rather than a documented, confirmed chain of coordination, and it is presented here as exactly that: a claim made by identified people, not an established fact.

The NATO Angle and the Reactions

The Ceuta crisis did not happen in a diplomatic vacuum. It landed on top of an existing rift between Spain and Washington over NATO obligations, one that the same House Appropriations Committee report discussed in Part Three addressed directly and separately from the Ceuta and Melilla language.

According to reporting that reviewed the committee report accompanying H.R. 8595, the report criticized Spain over its NATO defense spending levels and condemned Madrid's refusal to allow Iran related U.S. military operations to use Spanish military bases and airspace.¹³ That refusal is connected to Spain's broader posture toward the Israel Iran conflict: Spain has declined to participate in or facilitate U.S. military action against Iran, a position consistent with the Sanchez government's wider distancing from Israel described above.

That is the throughline Thomas Massie pointed to in his own posts, tying the Ceuta language, the NATO spending criticism, and Spain's Iran posture together as part of the same appropriations fight, and asking why Republicans who voted for a bill containing all three elements were expressing shock at a crisis touching on one of them. Whether that connection reflects actual coordinated pressure on Spain or simply reflects unrelated grievances landing in the same spending bill is, like the sovereignty question above, a matter of interpretation rather than settled fact.

What is documented is the range of official reactions once the crisis became public. President Trump described the scenes in Ceuta as "terrible" and a "catastrophe." Vice President Vance said the images highlighted the consequences of mass migration. The U.S. State Department expressed support for Spain's sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla even as the same week's appropriations report language drew criticism for appearing to lean the other way.¹⁵

In Europe, the reaction split along different lines. Twenty two European Union heads of state signed a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pointing to Spain's April 2026 mass regularization announcement as a contributing "pull factor" to the Ceuta surge. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni temporarily suspended the Schengen free movement agreement for air and sea travel from Spain in response.¹⁵ Spanish officials, including Sanchez, defended the government's handling of the crisis and pointed to the Supreme Court ruling, rather than the regularization program, as the direct legal trigger for the timing of the crossing.

Taken together, the NATO friction, the Iran related base access dispute, and the international reaction to the crisis show a Spain that entered this crisis already at odds with Washington and much of the transatlantic security relationship on multiple fronts, not only on migration. Whether the Ceuta crisis was a cause, a consequence, or simply a coincidence relative to that friction is not something the public record currently settles, and it is presented here as an open question rather than a conclusion.

OpinionWhere I Land on This

OpinionI want to be upfront here. Mass migration events like this are never a good thing, for the people forced into them or for the countries absorbing them, and nothing about pretending otherwise serves anyone. But something about the timing of all of this feels off to me.

OpinionTwo weeks before this crisis, House Republicans nearly unanimously backed language favorable to Morocco's claim over Ceuta and Melilla. Years earlier, the Israeli prime minister's own son was publicly calling for Arabs and Muslims to "free" those same two cities and floating the idea of NGO funding to make it happen. Spain, meanwhile, has spent the past year as one of Israel's loudest critics on the world stage, cutting arms deals, refusing U.S. use of its bases for operations against Iran, and drawing criticism from Washington over both. Individually, none of these facts prove anything. Together, they are a strange coincidence at minimum.

OpinionI want to be careful here, because I know I am capable of the same instinct I am about to criticize. It is very easy to look at anything involving Israel and immediately say "they did it," and I think that instinct is corrosive. It flattens real, documented grievances into background noise, and it lets people dismiss legitimate criticism as conspiracy thinking. So I am not saying Israel or the United States engineered this. What I am saying is that the pattern here is strange enough that it deserves an actual investigation, not a shrug and not a reflexive accusation either. If it turns out to be coincidence, fine. But nobody should be comfortable simply assuming that.

OpinionWhat worries me more than the coincidence itself is what it would mean if the answer turns out to be yes. If the United States quietly had no problem with a NATO ally getting destabilized because that ally broke from Israel over Gaza, that is not a small thing. It tells every other NATO member exactly where they stand if they ever step out of line the same way. It is the kind of signal that lets Israel treat Turkey, another NATO country with real friction with Israel, as the next adversary in waiting, because Washington already showed once that alliance loyalty has limits when Israel is involved. That should concern anyone who cares about NATO functioning as an actual alliance and not a one way arrangement.

OpinionI do not know what the full truth here is. I understand the argument that this is a genuine humanitarian crisis with genuine domestic causes in Spain, and I understand the argument that the timing is too convenient to ignore. I think both of those things can be worth taking seriously at once. What I am confident about is that this deserves real scrutiny, not spin from either direction.