Spain Says 67 Died in the Rush on Ceuta, and Now Almost Everyone Who Made It In Has Been Sent Back

CEUTA, Spain — The Spanish government said Saturday that 67 people died in the mass crossing into Ceuta, raising a toll that stood at nine only a day earlier and confirming that the two-day surge into the tiny North African enclave was the deadliest border event on Spain's southern frontier in decades.

Some of the dead drowned trying to swim around the breakwater that runs from the Moroccan shore into the Mediterranean. Others were killed in a stampede on the breakwater itself, crushed as people pushed toward the barrier in the dark. Spanish officials have said there may be additional casualties on the Moroccan side that Rabat has not accounted for.

Roughly 60,000 people breached the frontier between Thursday and Friday, an extraordinary number for a city of 84,000 residents wedged between the sea and the Moroccan border. By Saturday morning the streets that had been packed for two days were largely empty. Spain's interior ministry said the majority of those who entered had already gone back across, and a handful of exhausted swimmers who reached Ceuta's urban Tarajal beach at dawn were met by soldiers who walked them back to the crossing.

Spain announced it was installing a 500-meter containment barrier running along the breakwater fence out into the water — the specific stretch where most of the deaths occurred. The breakwater has been the weak point in Ceuta's defenses for years, because the land fence simply stops at the waterline and swimmers can go around it.

"Life in this city has been disrupted as a result of the border incident," said Juan Jesús Vivas, the president of the autonomous city of Ceuta. "The return of people has begun satisfactorily but the process must be completed. The city has not yet returned to normal."

Not everyone left. Mohamed Hatri, a 23-year-old Moroccan who made it across, said Spanish authorities had shut down commerce in the areas where migrants were gathered to starve them into going home. "They've closed everything down so that we can't buy anything to eat, to force us to return to our country," he said. "But even if they close it down, we're going to stay here, whether we're hungry or not."

Ceuta and the neighboring enclave of Melilla are the European Union's only land borders with Africa, and both depend heavily on Moroccan police to hold the line on the other side. The scale of Thursday's breach — tens of thousands of people moving at once, largely unopposed on the Moroccan side — echoed the crisis of May 2021, when about 8,000 people crossed into Ceuta during a diplomatic rupture between Madrid and Rabat. This time the number was roughly seven times larger.

The European Commission called an emergency meeting to discuss the situation. Spanish officials have not publicly accused Morocco of standing down its border force, and the Moroccan government has not offered an explanation for how a crowd that size assembled and moved without being stopped.