A budding health crisis appears to be fomenting in the Spanish autonomous territory of Ceuta amid reports of groups of illegal migrants creating unsanitary conditions on the city’s beaches and even schools, which are claimed to be littered with garbage and “excrement”.
In the wake of upwards of 72,000 illegals flooding across the border from Morocco last month, health officials are warning that the Spanish exclave with a population of just 87,000 is not equipped to handle the needs of the thousands of migrants who have remained in the area.
Speaking on the Espejo Público news programme on Spanish broadcaster Antena 3, University Hospital of Ceuta doctor Guadalupe Sánchez warned that the city is facing a “humanitarian catastrophe” with the mass influx of migrants overwhelming the healthcare system and the local government’s ability to house them.
With many of the remaining migrants being forced to live in makeshift accommodations on Ceuta’s beaches, Sánchez said that people are afraid to go down to the beaches, saying: “They are occupied, they are full of huts, people are eating there, throwing food, it’s full of clothes, of excrement, of cigarettes.”
“With all the diseases I’m seeing, because my WhatsApp is full of photos of people from Ceuta who say ‘look at what came out on my child’, impetigo, mange, contagious diseases, this is a sanitary catastrophe.”
“The beach is contaminated; it is contaminated because, this has to be said, they are peeing, they are doing their necessities, they are bathing,” the doctor added.
Dr Sánchez added that she was personally not allowing her son to go out on the streets of the city alone, and that many parents were concerned about their children being sexually assaulted by the young male migrants who remain in Ceuta despite the Spanish government’s claims that the city had returned to normal.
As reported, a Ceuta school that had been taken over as a ‘camp’ by migrants faced the same issue, with arrivals having forced their way into the gym through a window to take it over. Staff arriving at the school to prepare it for the new school year discovered “bucket containing excrement”.
This comes amid claims that multiple migrant girls under the age of 14 have been treated in local Ceuta hospitals after allegedly being raped while on the streets of the city.
In a viral video, a local young woman lamented that she only felt safe on the streets with her dog, complaining that the police and military were not doing enough to protect the citizens from the migrants. “You can’t live like this, I’m fed up,” she exclaimed.
Government officials have also warned about a potential collapse of the local health system, with Deputy Secretary of Health and Social Policy Carmen Fúnez saying on Tuesday that up to 12,000 illegals from Morocco have remained of the initial wave of around 72,000, and warned that until they “return to Morocco, normality will not be recovered in the city.”
He also warned of the risk of infectious outbreaks, potentially through the water, saying, “We must not leave their care to the voluntariness of the health workers who go to the beaches and places where migrants are.”
The president of the Ceuta Medical Association, Enrique Roviralta, also warned on Monday that the city is facing potential outbreaks of cholera, tuberculosis, measles, and infectious diarrhoea, among others.