The Government is unable to provide a reliable figure for how many immigrants have returned to Morocco and how many remain in Ceuta. The dance of numbers is, in itself, the diagnosis: the State does not control the situation.
What is indeed confirmed is what happened on Sunday night. According to the German agency NIUS, the immigrants whom the Army was supposed to transfer from the first reception camp to the beach for their return resisted violently, thwarted the operation, and marched in groups toward the city center.
What they chanted—clearly audible in the footage—is the shahada: «La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah», the Islamic profession of faith, the constitutive formula of belonging to the umma.
The sector that refuses to return invokes Allah against Spanish law. That is the nature of the conflict, and whoever does not wish to see it has decided not to see it.
Morocco knows what it is doing; Spain does not
None of this is new.
In May 2021, Rabat pushed ten thousand people across the border in just two days as retaliation for the reception of Brahim Ghali.
Morocco manages migratory pressure on Ceuta and Melilla as an instrument of foreign policy, with the territorial claim over both cities always on the table.
Each crisis constitutes a test of strength, and this one reaches a city of barely 83,000 inhabitants, with a Muslim population already approaching half the census and a Christian community in demographic decline.
The alms of the faithful, for the mutineers
In the midst of this scenario, the Church in Ceuta announces that the weekend collections will go entirely to the provisions of the invaders.
One may wonder whether they will also serve those who defied the Army while chanting the Islamic profession of faith through the streets.
Handing over the money of the faithful of Ceuta, precisely now and precisely to this contingent, amounts to rewarding the mutiny with the Sunday collection of those who suffer it.
There is no Gospel that justifies this; there is a hierarchy that has renounced discernment and calls its abdication mercy.
The Catholics of Ceuta, who for decades have sustained their faith on a frontier that Madrid and the curias only visit for the photo opportunity, deserve something better than seeing their alms turned into supplies for the challenge.