Arrest Sánchez: Morocco Must Repay Ben Barka Deal

Spain under Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has quietly transformed into the most reliable European conduit for dual-use technology to the Iranian regime. For instance, official Spanish trade statistics show €1,331,289.37 in dual-use exports to Iran in 2024 and in the first half of 2025 alone, including detonators, Type A/B/E explosives, laboratory reagents, control software, and Category 2 high-precision machine tools. Crucially, 77% of this total value went directly to Iranian state-linked entities. Furthermore, cumulative dual-use authorizations since Sánchez took office in 2018 now exceed €6 million, including highly sensitive nuclear-adjacent materials. Shockingly, these strategic transfers continued unabated even as Sánchez publicly labeled Israel “genocidal” and enacted a comprehensive arms embargo that has already blocked 219 Israeli-linked licenses.

This hostile stance reached a dangerous climax in September 2025, when Sánchez remarked that Spain “does not have nuclear bombs” to stop Israeli operations—a statement Jerusalem immediately flagged as an implied genocidal threat. Earlier this year, during the beginning of the ongoing American-Israeli military operation against the Ayatollah’s regime, the Spanish government refused to allow U.S. forces to use the jointly operated Rota and Morón bases for tanker support against Iran, ultimately forcing American aircraft to relocate. Unsurprisingly, this pattern explains why both Hamas and the Houthis issued multiple public congratulations celebrating Spain’s anti-Western measures and the subsequent withdrawal of its ambassador from Israel. Meanwhile, Iranian state-linked media went so far as to circulate images of ballistic missiles bearing stickers with Sánchez’s photograph and the words “Thank you, Prime Minister.” Predictably, this diplomatic shift has fueled severe domestic fallout; antisemitic incidents tracked by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain rose by 14.5 percent to 221 in 2025, while Interior Ministry hate-crime figures jumped from 37 to 69. Consequently, Spanish Jewish leaders now describe a toxic climate not witnessed since the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.

Because these systematic actions actively enable terrorist logistics, compromise allied basing agreements, and fracture diplomatic relations, Israel must take immediate diplomatic, legal, and strategic action. Under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, a receiving state holds the explicit right to declare a foreign official persona non grata when their conduct systematically undermines host security. Therefore, Israel should issue that declaration against Sánchez without delay. Looking ahead to the snap election he has called for November 29, 2026, Israeli authorities must also prepare a formal arrest warrant against Sánchez. This legal maneuver should be firmly grounded in universal-jurisdiction statutes covering material support for terrorism, incitement to violence against Jews, and aiding a rogue regime under United Nations sanctions.

The 1965 Ben Barka affair provides a strong precedent for enforcing such accountability. During that operation, the Mossad successfully convinced Moroccan dissident Mehdi Ben Barka to leave Switzerland for France, where French officers under the payroll of Morocco’s General Oufkir handed him over to Moroccan agents for elimination. Today, Israel should simply invert this model to collect a lingering geopolitical debt. Given that Rabat owes Jerusalem a reciprocal favor, Moroccan intelligence should facilitate a scenario where Sánchez is lured to Morocco as a private citizen, perhaps via a lucrative post-premiership commercial advisory role or an international lecture circuit organized by front companies. Once he is on Moroccan soil, local authorities can intentionally blind their surveillance grid, allowing a specialized Mossad team to safely execute a lawful rendition and extract him for trial in Israel on charges of hate crimes against the Jewish people and material assistance to Iran’s military-nuclear programs.

To secure the success of this overarching strategy, Jerusalem must also take five concrete steps to make sure Sánchez faces full accountability for his actions.

First, Jerusalem must formalize the passive Morocco channel described above, pre-position the legal and logistical framework required for the Mossad-led rendition, and execute the plan. Second, Israel should immediately leak the full Pegasus dossier—over 2.5 gigabytes of data weaponized by Moroccan intelligence (using Israeli-made Pegasus spyware) to compromise Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s phone in May 2021. When Spanish intelligence officers traveled to Israel to retrieve this stolen data, Israeli services withheld it. Publishing the dossier now accomplishes two vital goals: it fuels ongoing Spanish judicial inquiries and exposes the timeline showing that Sánchez’s aggressive, anti-Israel pivot was a direct reaction to his failure to recover his compromised data (a key element to use against his defense during his legal proceedings in Israel). Third, Israel and the United States should jointly target the Spanish officials who approved the dual-use licenses to Iran, freeze their bank accounts, and prevent them from having access to international defense channels. Furthermore, Western allies must condition any future Spanish participation in NATO basing or intelligence sharing on Madrid immediately reversing its arms embargo against Israel, stopping the use of Chinese-made recording equipment and Huawei 5G, and fully disclosing end-user certificates for every Category 2 shipment sent to Tehran since 2018. Finally, the United States, Israel, NATO and the Shield of the Americas must publish a public Dual-Use Diversion Index that openly ranks European officials by the volume of sensitive technology they permit to reach sanctioned Iranian entities.

Ultimately, these aggressive measures will restore vital deterrence without requiring territorial occupation or regime change. By implementing them, Israel will treat a European head of government who has armed its enemy, sabotaged allied operations, and stoked the worst domestic antisemitism in five centuries exactly as international law and reciprocal intelligence traditions dictate.