Was an attempted storming of a Spanish exclave in Morocco linked to the reactivation of western Eurasia’s maritime chokepoints?
The Cradle
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“It’s fairly plausible that the Moroccans facilitated the crisis, although they didn’t necessarily engineer it,” said Riccardo Fabiani, the North Africa project director of the International Crisis Group. “We know that the authorities knew about the online activity relating to Ceuta supposedly being open because they alerted the Spanish authorities.”
The border gives way
Plausible motives for Rabat to send such a combative message relate to a longstanding campaign to claim the two Spanish enclaves, a renewed sense of invincibility about its thriving alliances with the US and Israel, and a desire in Washington and Tel Aviv to punish Spain for not supporting the Iran war, reducing its volume of US liquefied natural gas (LNG) purchases and public criticism of Israel’s conduct toward the Palestinians.
Removing Spanish control over Ceuta, a port city that the Portuguese transferred to the Spanish in the 15th century, would cleave through EU attempts to extend Schengen to Gibraltar by creating an exclusively Moroccan-controlled southern route through Gibraltar.
“We cannot reasonably say that the US and Israel were involved in this, but there was definitely instigation for several weeks over Israeli accounts on social media, an appropriations bill in the House of Representatives that defined Ceuta and Melilla as ‘Spanish-administered’ and encouraged the State Dept to push Morocco and Spain to discuss the status of these two territories,” said Fabiani. “All this was perhaps intended to show the Spaniards that this territory isn’t defensible without Moroccan goodwill.”
Despite overwhelming evidence, Morocco denies facilitating access to the enclave and prosecuted at least one of the hundreds of Moroccans who described how they arrived in Ceuta. The US backtracked from its earlier support for Morocco's claims over the Spanish enclaves, with a State Department spokesperson stating on 6 August that “the United States unequivocally supports Spain's sovereignty over Ceuta and Melilla.”
“Morocco doesn’t have an interest in a new Spanish government as they’re getting all they want from the current one,” said Jacob Mundy, associate professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University in the US, referring to Spain’s support for Rabat’s proposed solution to the Western Sahara imbroglio. “The way that this all connects to what’s going on in the West Asia is Spain’s position on Palestine and the Iran war; the US and Israel are very unhappy with it.”
Ceuta sits on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar and has belonged to Spain since before the ruling Alawi dynasty unified Morocco in the 17th century. Gibraltar’s importance as a maritime chokepoint controlling entry and exit into the Mediterranean Sea has soared ever since conflict hampered commerce in other strategic passages like the Persian Gulf’s Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandab. Iran’s unwillingness to reopen the Strait of Hormuz until the US pays for war damage has underscored how quickly control of a strategic maritime passage can become a geopolitical bargaining tool. The arrival of Chinese factories boosted Morocco’s geopolitical importance and turned the country into a trade and geopolitical battlefield between Washington, Beijing, and Brussels, especially after Spain denied the US the use of the Rota and Moron military bases to conduct its war on Iran.
“Morocco is capitalizing on the nationalistic feelings generated by the team’s good performance in the World Cup to play the card that we’re reclaiming our sovereignty across the land,” said a Moroccan academic who requested anonymity. “The Sahara issue has been resolved due to Trump’s support, so what remains are Ceuta and Melilla, and the best time to do this is as the international order is collapsing.”
Migration blowback
European politicians partially suspended free movement within the Schengen Zone and chastised socialist Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s pro-migration policies in the aftermath of the Ceuta incident. Right-wing Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis warned that “the EU is increasingly confronted with ... the deliberate instrumentalization of migration by state and nonstate actors seeking to test Europe’s resilience, undermine its cohesion and extract political concessions.”
Mitsotakis was referencing a 2020 border conflict with neighbor Turkiye when its security forces permitted tens of thousands of migrants to reach the border with Greece. Greek riot police and local farmers faced off with the migrants across the Evros River for a week, and the country’s security services classified the incident as orchestrated hybrid warfare.
Spanish security came to the same conclusion last month after identifying Moroccan intelligence agents among the crowds inside Ceuta. But the Spanish government opted for a more conciliatory approach, blaming trafficking networks and a social media-fueled conspiracy for the surge in arrivals, without referencing Moroccan state involvement. The incident ended with a majority of the infiltrators returning to their cities.
“As a Moroccan, the optics of the country’s elites pledging alliance to the King in Tetouan, just a few kilometres from where tens of thousands of youths were dumping their misery on our neighbors was very depressing,” said Moroccan journalist and academic Aboubakr Jamai in reference to the storming of Ceuta happening on Throne Day – a national holiday when elites renew their allegiance to the King – who also delivers a state-of-the-nation speech outlining reforms and successes. “How can you crow about your achievements when your youth is so desperate?”
Situated at the extreme edges of the EU, both Turkiye and Morocco instrumentalize migration flows to exact concessions from EU neighbors: in 2021, Morocco expressed its displeasure over Spain welcoming Brahim Ghali, the head of the anti-Moroccan Western Saharan liberation movement the Polisario, for medical treatment, by lifting access restrictions to Ceuta and flooding the enclave with aspiring immigrants to the EU. There was an Algerian pretext this time too, after Sanchez signed a 20 July agreement for expanded Algerian natural gas deliveries to Spain that replaced Washington as Madrid's primary supplier.
“Ceuta allows Spain, and through it its European allies, to control the gateways to the Mediterranean,” said Laurent Ozon, a French geopolitician and author of ‘The Neo-Reactionaries: A Western Panic,’ who believes that Morocco aspires to take back the Mediterranean port at the behest of its allies. “The United States and Israel want to impose a second Moroccan corridor for this strait, so as not to be dependent on them.”
Although shipping is allowed free passage through the Strait of Gibraltar by the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the US and Israel have shown a disregard for international law in favor of securing access through diplomatic and military coercion. Trump’s second presidency witnessed the US forcing Panama to wrest its canal away from its Chinese owners and express ambitions to acquire Greenland, which controls northern maritime access to the Americas, and Gaza, which sits a few kilometers from the Suez Canal. Israel increased its presence in the Red Sea through cultivating diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia and Somaliland and established an intelligence presence in the islands of Socotra and Dahlak.
The Strait of Gibraltar has witnessed an almost 50 percent increase in US-originating trade since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine forced Europe’s geopolitical restructuring. The vast majority of US products entering the Mediterranean through Gibraltar are LNG shipments replacing now-sanctioned Russia’s traditionally cheaper supply. Unlike other strategic maritime passages like the Strait of Malacca or Suez, Gibraltar is a hard chokepoint for Mediterranean access, so, at a time of escalating global tensions, its geopolitical importance is rising fast.
Maritime dominoes
The Ceuta incident came at a time of rising global turmoil over the maritime passages of western Eurasia. The activation of these chokepoints, usually peaceful in times of stability, typically signals that a global power rearrangement is in progress. During both world wars, narrow passages like the Turkish Straits, Bab al-Mandab, and Gibraltar formed active fronts and featured at the center of the Dardanelles, Horn of Africa, and Mediterranean U-boat campaigns.
Israel developed an interest in Gibraltar after finding itself locked out of maritime connectivity with the Arab Peninsula and Asian markets in recent years. To secure its Mediterranean approach, it constructed partnerships with Greece, Cyprus and Morocco, selling them sophisticated eavesdropping software with a technological backdoor like Pegasus and Predator, and the Barak MX anti-missile radar that grants Tel Aviv oversight of aerial activity across the Mediterranean and North Africa.
Both Israel and Morocco are in an irredentist phase, as Israel targets several regional regimes and Morocco promotes “an idea that the land existing before 1912 is much larger than the land they ended up with, and that they were dispossessed of West Algeria, Northern Mali, Mauritania and some islands,” according to Mundy. “The Moroccans feel that Melilla and Ceuta are part of their country.”
“Europe is in decline and in the coming years we’ll have another struggle: an anti-liberationist movement in Ceuta and Melilla,” predicts Portuguese sociologist and philosopher Boaventura de Sousa Santos. He adds, “If Morocco controls them, they control Gibraltar, and the initiative shifts from Europe to the US and Israel, who are basically seeking to gain control of the West Asia and commerce with the east.”
Competition between Morocco and Spain has peaked since the creation of Tanger Med and Nador West Med, two giant deepwater container ports next to Ceuta and Melilla that are part of a Moroccan blockade of the Spanish enclaves. It is a strategy that fuses “Israeli drones, radars, electronic warfare, and command networks with Moroccan sovereignty, delivering permanent oversight over shipping lanes serving the Spanish enclaves,” American-Israeli researcher and former Israeli soldier Jose Lev Alvarez wrote in May.
The Strait of Gibraltar aka the Strait of Ceuta
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine activated the Turkish Straits and the US-Israeli war against Iran the Strait of Hormuz. Then, in July 2026, Yemen's Iranian allies Ansarallah closed Bab al-Mandab to Saudi shipping, limiting traffic through the Red Sea. On 28 July, even as the Ceuta migration crisis peaked, mystery drones smashed into two LNG ships in the Egyptian port of Damietta, just 50 kilometers from the Suez Canal. Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones continue to attack ships carrying Russian produce along the Black Sea’s trade routes and through the Dardanelles. The incidents paint a generalized picture of a western Eurasia in crisis, as rival actors fight over traditionally open maritime passages.
Aside from being the linchpin controlling entry into the Mediterranean, the Strait of Gibraltar exists at the center of several worlds: “it separates Spain from Morocco, Christendom from Dar al-Islam, imperial Europe from colonial Africa, the great ocean from the inland sea.” So writes University of Buffalo academic Sasha Pack in his ‘The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Modern Hispano-African Borderland.’ He goes on to say, “In addition to a north-south border, this peculiar geopolitical space is also an east–west passage. It forms a junction in a major maritime thoroughfare, one that became global in 1869 with the opening of the Suez Canal at the opposite end of the Mediterranean.”
It was this shortcut to circumnavigating Africa that the US and Israel are seeking to deprive the Chinese of, argues Santos – who identifies Gibraltar as a historical “flashpoint for conflict”. In fact, he identifies the capture of Ceuta by the Portuguese in 1415, which unlocked important continental discoveries, as the beginning of Europe’s centuries-long commercial ascent and westward expansion, against a backdrop of Muslim civilizational decline. Within a century, the Portuguese would circumnavigate Africa and, thanks to the extraordinary travels of Portuguese explorer Pero da Covilha, construct a fort in Hormuz and secure a route to India and China.
Portugal’s acquisition of Ceuta was the first step in a long process enabling the mercantile kingdom to bypass the trading superpowers of the Italian republics and Arab dynasties and become the world’s pre-eminent thalassocracy. Though Portugal is a shadow of its former self today, its Chinese trading partner remains a global power, while Morocco retains importance as a flashpoint between the US and China.
“The Chinese are investing billions in auto factories and battery plants, having figured out that you can use Morocco as a backdoor to get stuff into the EU and the US that normally the US wouldn’t allow in if it came directly from China,” said Michael Shurkin, a former CIA analyst now working for Senegal-based consultancy 14 North Strategies.
Chinese companies are bypassing western tariffs to take advantage of Morocco’s free trade agreement with the US and association pact with the EU by manufacturing products with “Moroccan origin” status. China is practicing nearshoring, whereby it dispatches core components to rapid assembly facilities closer to their intended markets. “Because the real adversary is China, and Morocco is the most strategic African country in the struggle between the US and China,” said Santos, “and because the Chinese always prefer to deliver their products via the Mediterranean, the Americans are trying to eliminate these shortcuts.”
US pivot to Morocco
Traditionally a US foreign policy outlier, Morocco is moving to the center of Washington’s calculations. The rapprochement started with Rabat’s joining the Abraham Accords in 2021, in exchange for Washington’s recognition of its claim over Western Sahara, and proceeded with discussions to relocate the Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM). Morocco received several mentions in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), primarily in developing defense ties and as a provider of phosphate, an essential ingredient for the fertilizer that has become rarer due to the closing of the Persian Gulf.
“There’s clearly a pro-Morocco slant in the NDAA and the best example is the 2027 military spending bill, which has a lot to say about Morocco,” said Shurkin. “It’s unusual to be upgrading Moroccan military bases and boosting interoperability between militaries, but Morocco is the Saudi Arabia of phosphates, which is a strategic mineral because it speaks to American food security.”
Morocco is likely to angle for a civilian nuclear deal of the type that Saudi Arabia briefly appeared to get in July but was later predicated on its signing a peace deal with Israel.
At the center of the Morocco–Israel relationship is Yariv Elbaz, an influential Moroccan-Israeli businessman who facilitated the Abraham Accords, and whose Adarco Energy partnered with Israeli firm NewMed Energy to secure offshore natural gas exploration rights in the disputed Atlantic waters off Western Sahara. Elbaz shares investments in Gabon with Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and runs a company that acted as an intermediary to transport Emirati oil to Israel. One of his partners is Abdelwali el-Himma, the son of the King’s closest advisor, whose 54 Capital fund also stands to benefit.
“Morocco is using the relationship with the Americans and Israelis to impose its sovereignty over the Western Sahara, but in the process it’s surrendering it to these interests,” said a Moroccan political analyst who requested anonymity. “A small group of companies connected to the Americans and Israelis is taking advantage of phosphates, fisheries and energy in a very opaque way that has never been discussed in parliament.”
The thousands of young Moroccans seeking to flee their country express a social turmoil that was recently on show in both the 2016-2017 Rif movement and the 2025 Gen Z protests. Even if a referendum were held over Ceuta and Melilla’s future, their Arabic-speaking, Muslim residents, whose average salary is 10 times the average Moroccan one, are unlikely to choose unification with Morocco.
In May, Morocco’s flourishing relationship with Israel was on show at the large-scale African Lion military drills, where the Israeli army's Golani Brigade participated for the first time. Morocco has already established a drone production facility for Israel Aerospace Industries subsidiary Blue Bird in Casablanca, and is dispatching a military contingent to police Gaza.
“The Israelis have such a long track history of divide-and-rule,” said Brody, “One way of putting pressure is via Morocco which, through joining the Abraham Accords, has seen massively increased levels of cooperation with the IDF.”
Israel and maritime access
Throughout its existence, Israel has struggled with maritime resupply. Even before its creation, it had to import Jewish port workers from the Greek port of Thessaloniki to Haifa in the 1930s to break the British embargo on arms and settlers to Palestine. Its Red Sea-facing port of Eilat was subjected to successive Egyptian embargoes: immediately after its war of creation in 1949–1951, and again from 1967 to 1979. It was only after Tel Aviv and Cairo signed a peace treaty that Israeli ships regained access to the Indian Ocean and African and Asian markets.
But the Ansarallah-led Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) reimposed the blockade in November 2023. A month later, Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naghdi publicly threatened Israel and its allies with a future “closure of the Mediterranean Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar and other waterways” due to Israel’s Gaza campaign. Port actions in several Mediterranean countries protesting Israel’s arms resupply, Iranian precision strikes on Israeli port facilities, and an embargo on ships representing Israeli interests in the Persian Gulf all escalated the issue of maritime access. Morocco opened its ports to the American ships transporting arms to Israel that Spain had refused to accept and repressed the dock workers refusing to unload them.
Israel has carried out extensive secret operations in the Mediterranean, both consensual and clandestine, over the past 70 years. In 1954, a Mossad network detonated bombs in Egyptian cultural centers and cinemas in a false flag operation intended to frighten Egypt’s Jews into emigrating to Israel and harden British resolve over remaining after its Suez War defeat. In the 1960s, Israel coordinated in secret with the Moroccan government to extract tens of thousands of native Jews, operated a clandestine network of operatives in French colonial Algeria's Constantine, and assassinated the deputy leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the Tunisian suburb of Carthage in 1988. More recently, an Algerian submarine forced an Israeli submarine seeking to record a military exercise to surface in September 2021. Since 2025, Israel has carried out sabotage and interdiction operations against several activist flotillas seeking to reach Gaza to deliver aid and break the siege, in Tunis and off the coast of Crete.
Relations with Morocco, which started in the 1950s, had so advanced by 1967 that King Hassan passed on recordings of an Arab League preparatory meeting for the Six-Day War that revealed a poor state of military preparation and convinced Israel to carry out its devastating pre-emptive strike on the Arab armies. Israel rewarded the gesture by offering intelligence and logistical assistance in capturing prominent Moroccan leftist and opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris, as revealed by the 2026 book ‘L'Affaire Ben Barka: La fin des secrets.’
In the 1970s, Israel and Morocco participated in the Safari Club, a secret intelligence body organized by the USA and France, comprising Egypt, South Africa and the Shah’s Iran, that fought covert Cold War proxy battles against leftist regimes. Morocco, whose paratroopers fought in defense of European companies’ mining rights in Zaire, became the second-largest African recipient of American aid during the Cold War after Egypt, and brokered the landmark 1979 Egyptian–Israeli peace deal that broke the Arab front towards Israel. In the 1990s, Moroccan intelligence and Mossad sought to assassinate Osama bin Laden.
“Along with the UAE, Morocco currently has the densest relationship with Israel of any Muslim country, and probably even compared with western countries,” said Jamai. “It is not a sovereign country, at least from a security standpoint, because we’re so beholden to Israeli interests.”
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