The Diplomat
Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares will appear before the plenary session of the Congress this coming Wednesday, June 24, to answer questions about Spain’s position regarding the recent deaths of three members of the Polisario Front during a Moroccan attack.
Specifically, Albares will appear in the last government question time session of the current parliamentary term and will have to answer a question from Deputy Francesc-Marc Álvaro Vidal, of the Republican Parliamentary Group, entitled “What do you owe the Kingdom of Morocco?”.
In the question, which is on the Congress agenda and whose content has been accessed by the Europa Press news agency, ERC criticizes the minister for not yet condemning the deaths of three members of the Polisario Front, including Lehbib Mohamed Abdelaziz, son of former president Mohamed Abdelaziz, during a drone attack carried out on June 7 by the Moroccan Armed Forces near the separation wall in the former Spanish colony.
Lehbib Mohamed Abdelaziz, 37, and son of Mohamed Abdelaziz (one of the founders of the Polisario Front and president of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic from 1982 until his death in 2016), had been appointed in 2024 as head of the First Field Brigade and a member of the National Secretariat of the Front.
As a consequence of these events, Sumar, a minority member of Pedro Sánchez’s government, denounced Morocco’s “violations of the ceasefire,” which ignore UN Security Council Resolution 2797/2026, and the deaths of three Polisario Front activists during a “Moroccan drone attack.” Sumar demanded that Morocco’s ambassador, Karima Benyaich, be summoned to explain these events.
The situation in Western Sahara is the main point of international contention between the two components of the coalition government since President Pedro Sánchez’s decision to endorse the autonomy plan proposed by Rabat.
For his part, the Polisario Front representative in Spain, Abdulah Arabi, denounced the “double standards” of Spanish foreign policy, which “only questions, investigates and condemns events when they are caused by one of the parties,” while “when the victims are Sahrawis, the silence becomes deafening,” referring to the recent message from the Spanish Embassy in Rabat condemning a Polisario Front attack in Esmara, in the part of the Sahara controlled by Morocco, which caused no casualties.