Hundreds in Fnideq Wait for News of Missing Relatives After Ceuta Border Crossing

Hundreds of people gathered in the northern Moroccan town of Fnideq, near the border with the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, holding up photographs of missing relatives and showing them to passersby in hopes of finding them.

The spot where they stood was the very area that shocked the world last week, when some 72,000 people poured into Ceuta, a small Spanish territory in North Africa.

On Tuesday, as European Union interior ministers convened an emergency online meeting to address the ongoing tensions, attention on the Moroccan side of the border focused on the tragic death toll.

According to local officials, at least 88 people died in Ceuta and 11 others in Morocco, while dozens remain missing.

“I have only one son,” said Hadijja, who has been waiting at the border since Saturday, scanning the returning crowds for her 23-year-old son. “I have no news of him; he doesn’t answer his phone.”

She traveled from Tangier to the border, suspecting that her unemployed son was among those who crossed. “He didn’t tell me he was going to cross,” she said. “This is a tragedy.”

An estimated 70,000 people who arrived in Ceuta last weekend have been taken back to Morocco in recent days, Spain’s interior minister said on Tuesday.

Referring to posts on TikTok, Facebook, and WhatsApp claiming that Morocco was allowing people to cross, residents made their way to Fnideq by road or crammed onto buses and cars, joining the flow of people heading to Spain.

Madrid moved quickly, coordinating with Rabat to return most of the migrants within 48 hours, while facing a political crisis after calls to suspend Spain’s membership in the Schengen free-movement area.

Upon returning to Moroccan soil, some said they came back voluntarily. “I was hungry for days and full of fear,” said Abselam, a 19-year-old from Kenitra in northwestern Morocco.

A Ceuta resident eventually took him in, giving him food and shelter, before he decided to return. “It’s not worth it; there are no jobs for everyone.”

Others said they were forced out of the Spanish territory. “Police surrounded a group of us and escorted us toward the border,” said Simo, a 21-year-old from Tetuan. “We didn’t really have a choice.”

In recent days, several Spanish NGOs have expressed concern that some migrants who entered Ceuta and qualified for international protection were returned before they could exercise their right to seek asylum.

On Tuesday, the Spanish government estimated that about 2,000 migrants who crossed remain in Ceuta. This includes at least 862 children registered as unaccompanied minors, while UNICEF Spain warned that dozens more children might still be wandering the streets without protection.

“Many young children crossed; we don’t know how many have disappeared,” Susana Hidalgo, a migration expert with the organization, told TVE. As a result, the situation in Ceuta is “extremely difficult.”

“There are many families on the other side of the border looking for their sons and daughters,” she said, while in Ceuta “there are 10- and 12-year-olds asking for a phone to call their mothers and say they are okay.”

Spanish police said on Tuesday they had set up an office in Ceuta to receive reports of missing people.

Concern about the fate of unaccompanied minors in Ceuta heightened on Tuesday after Spanish media published a video showing a 12-year-old boy crying and pleading with soldiers not to send him back to Morocco. After bystanders intervened, pointing out that Spanish law prevents the expulsion of unaccompanied children, the operation—carried out just meters from the border—was stopped.

Days after the sudden surge, questions about the causes of the mass crossing remain unanswered. Morocco faces accusations about its possible role. “People feel that this, if not staged, was at least encouraged or allowed by Morocco,” Juan Jesús Vivas, the long-serving conservative leader of Ceuta, said earlier this week.

A senior Moroccan official dismissed the implication. “To say that Morocco merely needed to use force to stop them is too simplistic. That completely misunderstands this phenomenon,” the official told AFP.

“At one point, Moroccan law enforcement could not confront the migrants because the numbers were too large” and because of “the strong pull effect,” he added. “Spain, seeing them arrive, what could it do to stop them with just weapons and security forces? That is impossible.”

In a statement published on Sunday, Morocco’s Interior Ministry blamed “the exploitation of digital spaces” and “the spread of false information” to explain the mass crossing.

Spanish intelligence sources suggest the surge may have originated from a hoax that spread quickly on social media after Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants arriving by sea cannot be expelled under summary procedures.

The Moroccan official said Rabat had tried to warn Madrid about the consequences of that ruling. “We began exchanging with the Spanish side around July 22–23, when the networks started talking about this issue,” the official told AFP. “We explained that this ruling would create a problem. And it did.”

The claim was rejected by Spain’s Migration Minister Elma Saiz. “At no time was there any evidence, any report warning us of the scale of this unprecedented event,” she told reporters in Madrid.

The uncertainty over what actually happened has spread to Fnideq, where relatives gathered at the border whisper about what might have happened to their loved ones.

Many still hold hope, pointing to positive stories that emerged in recent days, such as that of Fatima, who spent the day at the border with her family looking for her brother, who had crossed into Ceuta a few days earlier.

“My brother’s phone battery died, but yesterday he borrowed a phone from a Spanish person to call me,” she said. “He said he would come back tomorrow, so we’re waiting here. I’m sure he will arrive soon.”