Meanwhile, French interior minister Laurent Nuñez is currently on French TV, speaking after today’s meeting of the bloc’s ministers to discuss the latest on Ceuta.

He says that during the three-hour meeting, the ministers expressed their “solidarity” with Spain and praised how Madrid handled the crisis last week. (Erm, did not sound like it last week!)

He says the Spanish minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, told colleagues that some 70,000 crossed the border and were returned to Morocco.

75 dead bodies have been recovered so far, Grande-Malaska told ministers, stressing that this figure was “preliminary” and could rise further.

The ministers also discussed the measures taken by Spain to strengthen its border, including a new floating barrier.

(This may not sound like a lot, but it’s a legally critical point as it will clearly classify any attempt to cross the border as falling under one of the exceptions to the recent Supreme Court restrictive ruling on pushbacks, allowing authorities for speedier processing of repatriation.)

Nuñez also said the ministers were concerned about attempts to sow disinformation about the crisis and “interference” by foreign states in a bid to criticise the bloc and “sow division” among member states.

He says France remains available to help Spain in whatever way possible. In this context, he mentions France’s decision to strengthen its checks on its borders with Spain to prevent “secondary movements”, including towards France and the UK.

The minister also stresses the need to fight against human smuggling gangs, including the work “upstream” in the countries of origin.

He also says all countries strongly backed the EU’s Asylum and Migration Pact, which he called “indispensable” in the fight against irregular migration.

But hear more about this proposal – and the EU’s initial response – from the bloc’s migration commissioner, Brunner, during his press conference in the next hour.

I will bring you the key lines here when it happens.

Well, turns out you don’t quite need to be a fly on the wall to know what the EU ministers are talking about in the context of last week’s events in Ceuta, as some of them are actually quite keen to make their remarks public.

Italy is understood to have called for EU-funded migrant processing centres and return hubs in third countries, with interior minister Matteo Piantedosi telling ministers that they “must act as a united, cohesive bloc to stop departures at their source and return those who have no right to remain on EU territory”, a copy of his speech released by his office showed.

“Now the time has come to put into practice new ​hub models for the external processing of asylum procedures and ‌for returns in safe third countries,” he was quoted by Reuters as saying.

But as we extensively covered in the Guardian, the apparent model for this solution – Italy’s controversial deal with Albania – has faced numerous legal challenges.

The Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Michael O’Flaherty, wrote for us last month saying that “without iron-clad legal safeguards, offshore migration centres can only repeat the worst mistakes of the recent past.”

Other countries in central and eastern Europe are also reporting disruptions caused by the extreme weather conditions.

The Czech Republic has recorded the highest nighttime temperature since records began, with 27.9°C in Bystřice pod Hostýnem, ČT24 reported.

A similar record was broken across the border, in Slovakia, with 27.5°C overnight in Plavecký Peter, surpassing the previous record from 2013, Pravda reported.

Temperatures are expected to rise up to 39C later today.

Oh, interesting: the EU migration commissioner Brunner has just pushed back his press conference by about an hour, as the meeting is still ongoing.

It’s now expected after 2pm local time (1pm UK).

Oh, to be a fly on the wall on that call.

Meanwhile, the European Commission said it was “monitoring very closely” the situation in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania as the region faces an energy crunch caused by the ongoing heatwave and drought.

Energy spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen said, “The low Danube levels will clearly have an impact on nuclear generation along the route,” and the issue “concerns several member states.”

The commission was ready to “convene an electricity coordination group as soon as there is a need for it”.

“Generally speaking, climate risks and extreme weather events have been embedded in many of our energy and transport policies for some time, so we will obviously include these aspects in all our future work as well,” she said.

We are expecting to hear from the EU’s migration commissioner, Magnus Brunner, in the next hour, as he will brief journalists on today’s meeting of the bloc’s interior ministers on Ceuta.

Back to discussions on Ceuta, now under way in Brussels (10:08), a senior Moroccan official claimed that Morocco had warned Spain that a recent Spanish court ruling that migrants arriving by sea would not face immediate removal was going to create “a problem”, AFP reported.

Spain’s Supreme Court ruled on 8 July that migrants arriving by sea should not be returned as quickly as others, and Madrid has blamed criminal gangs for spreading misinformation about the ruling.

“We started engaging with the Spanish side around 22-23 July, when the networks began talking about the issue,” the Moroccan senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Monday night.

“We discussed this ruling and its impact. We explained that this ruling was going to create a problem. And it did create a problem,” he said.

The official also rejected any suggestion that Morocco was to be blamed for the crisis, saying, “At a certain point, the Moroccan law enforcement forces could no longer confront the migrants because the numbers were huge” and because “the pull effect was forceful,” he said.

“Today, it is up to Spain to find answers to the challenges posed by this ruling,” he said.

Spain has responded to the ruling recently by installing new border containment structures that would give them a legal basis to use an exemption in the court’s ruling and allow them to send migrants back across the border.

Meanwhile, Hungary’s prime minister, Péter Magyar, praised the solidarity of Hungarians after the country faced “the most difficult and critical night” amid a heatwave and energy crunch.

In a video on Facebook, Magyar repeated that the Paks power plant was just “millimetres away” from being shut down overnight, but the water levels had started rising again as of this morning.

He praised the “solidarity” shown by Hungarians in reducing their energy consumption and thanked those who are working to stabilise the country’s energy grid in these challenging circumstances.

“Tonight’s turn of events gives us cause for optimism, but the hardest days are still ahead of us,” he warned, as Hungary faces a few more days of extreme temperatures.

“Scorching heat of over 40°C, drought, and further hardships await, but light can now be seen at the end of the tunnel as cooler weather arrives from Friday and, hopefully, much-needed rain in the upper areas of the Danube,” he said.

Temperatures in Budapest are expected to get close to 40C later today.

Meanwhile, a 4.3 magnitude earthquake was reported in the Italian city of Pisa, which was also felt in Livorno, Lucca and Massa Carrara in northern Tuscany, Italian media reported.

The National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology reported that the earthquake’s epicentre was 7km west of Pisa.

The Tuscan president Eugenio Giani said the authorities were checking across the region to see if there’s any damage. He later added that while “hundreds” of calls to emergency services were made, there are currently no reports of injuries.

Last Thursday, a 4.7 quake was also reported in the Campi Flegrei caldera, west of Naples.

Ashifa Kassam in Madrid, Okba Mohammad in Ceuta and Lisa O’Carroll in London

A growing chorus of voices has accused Morocco of helping to fuel the crisis in Ceuta, with the leader of the Spanish enclave describing last week’s border crossings as an attack on Spain’s territorial integrity that was seen as being “if not orchestrated, at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco”.

Spanish officials ⁠said on Monday that an estimated 69,500 people who had arrived late last week in Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory in north Africa, had returned to Morocco in recent days. About 2,500 people who had made the crossing were still in Ceuta, officials believed.

The extraordinary influx had overwhelmed the city of 84,000 people and set off a political crisis across the EU as some member states laid blame on Spain.

In Ceuta, leaders pointed to the broader picture of what had transpired. “It’s an atrocity,” said Juan Jesús Vivas, the long-serving conservative leader of the territory.

“There are 88 bodies in the morgue, and there are more on the other side of the border.”

He said local people watched the events play out with a mix of sadness, worry and anguish.

“People see the situation not as a migration crisis; it was fundamentally an attack, a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity,” Vivas told El País newspaper. “People felt that the incident, if not orchestrated, was at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco.”

He drew a parallel with May 2021, when Rabat loosened border controls, allowing 10,000 people to cross into Ceuta over the course of two days, during a diplomatic standoff over Madrid’s decision to allow a Western Sahara independence leader to be treated for Covid-19 in Spain.

This time around, analysts have suggested that Spain’s recent rapprochement with Rabat’s arch-enemy Algeria could have triggered a response from Morocco.

in Brussels

Over in Brussels, after a weekend of backbiting over the response to the mass border crossings in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, EU ministers will seek to present a more unified front – and signal tougher security at Europe’s frontiers.

EU home affairs ministers are meeting at 10.30 CET via video conference to assess the bloc’s response to the arrival – and quick departure – of tens of thousands of people in Spanish territory in North Africa. Around 100 people are estimated to have died on both sides of the Spanish-Moroccan border.

Ministers are not expected to take decisions, but EU sources think they will give a broad endorsement to the measures outlined by the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Monday, intended to ensure stronger border protection “at critical points” of the EU’s external borders.

Von der Leyen wants to double down on five areas: strengthening cooperation with non-EU countries to prevent migration; stronger external borders; implementing early warning systems; dismantling smuggling networks; and boosting returns of people with no right to stay.

At a meeting of senior EU diplomats on Monday, several countries stressed the importance of preventing sudden movements of people, calling for greater use of intelligence and monitoring of disinformation and misinformation.

While Madrid’s envoy voiced his government’s frustration with the response from some member states, others rejected suggestions that they had failed to show solidarity over the sudden influx of arrivals.

Several member states said they were ready to help and reflected on their experience: Poland and Lithuania referred to the instrumentalisation of people on the move by the Belarusian dictatorship, while Italy and Greece spoke of their dealings with the sudden arrival of large numbers of people. But despite the warm words, many governments remain critical of Spain’s plan to regularise 500,000 undocumented migrants, which has triggered nearly 1.2 million applications.

One EU diplomat said:

“There is some concern that the regularisation of 1.2m people can be used to paint a picture that the door is open.”

This issue is set to run. And EU migration policy in general, including controversial plans for return hubs, will be high on the agenda in the autumn, including at the EU’s next scheduled summit in October.

Hungary has come “within millimetres” of having to shut down its nuclear power plant overnight, Prime Minister Péter Magyar said, as low water levels in the Danube continue to pose challenges for countries in south-eastern Europe.

“Around 1:30 a.m. we were a few millimetres away from completely shutting down the Paks Power Plant, but then the water level stopped falling, and by morning it had risen 1.5 centimetres. The last turbine is currently operating safely,” Magyar said on social media.

The plant already operates at a reduced capacity of just over 10% after the Danube fell to a record low, making it impossible to cool it properly.

Energy minister István Kapitány said on Tuesday that a number of energy-saving measures succeeded in lowering energy consumption to keep the grid secure.

Several businesses have made significant adjustments to their normal ways of working to save energy consumption during the peak hours. For example, grocery chain Lidl changed its baking shifts and turned off its drink fridges – despite temperatures expected to get close to 40°C. Electric car chargers in their parking can only be used until 5pm, HVG reported.

Over in Romania, the government celebrated a two-centimetre rise in water levels after yesterday’s spectacular controlled explosion, intended to divert the flow of the Danube to help cool its Cernavodă nuclear plant.

The plant manager told local media that it should help keep the plant running over the coming days, but more interventions are planned today, including sinking old barges to further divert the flow of water.

Temperatures are set to surpass 40°C in large parts of Romania again today.

Elsewhere, I will monitor the much-anticipated meeting of EU interior ministers, who will discuss last week’s migration crisis in Ceuta, amid questions about the EU’s relationship with Morocco and the steps needed to secure the bloc’s external borders.

They are meeting at 10am Brussels time, and we should hear from the EU’s migration commissioner, Magnus Brunner, in the early afternoon.

I will bring you all the latest lines here.

It’s Tuesday, 4 August 2026; it’s Jakub Krupa here, and this is Europe Live.