ROME (AP) — The manager of a small hotel in northern Italy refused a reservation made by an Israeli couple, accusing Israeli people of being “responsible for genocide.” Jewish groups decried the incident as an example of antisemitism.
The couple had booked two nights for the beginning of November at the Hotel Garni Ongaro in Selva di Cadore, a mountain village surrounded by the Dolomites, using the Booking.com online reservation platform.
A day before their departure, they received a message from the hotel’s staff: “Good morning. We inform you that the Israeli people as those responsible for genocide are not welcome customers in our structure.”
The hotel manager then invited the tourists to cancel their reservation, adding they “would be happy to grant free cancellation.” The manager has since closed his Facebook profile, and he wasn’t immediately available for comment.
“I feel infinite sadness for the ignorance shown by certain people,” Dario Calimani, the president of the Jewish Community of Venice, said on Thursday. “When you don’t agree with what Israel does, you spread hatred against all Israelis.”
The incident caught the attention of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which has confirmed they were investigating the matter.
Booking.com said Friday that it had removed the hotel from its platform.
“We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind and in the rare event that we are alerted to discriminatory behavior from a property, we investigate immediately and will remove the listing from our platform, just as we have done in this instance,” the travel site said in an email sent to The Associated Press.
The Veneto region governor, Luca Zaia, dubbed the incident as “extremely serious.”
“I feel deeply disturbed and I’m shocked by what has happened,” he said. “Veneto must guarantee its doors are open to all.”
The incident came as cases of antisemitism in Italy, including expressions of racism and discrimination against Jews, have been increasing over the past year amid the war in Gaza.
The incident came as cases of antisemitism in Italy, including expressions of racism and discrimination against Jews, have been increasing over the past year amid the war in Gaza, according to the Antisemitism Observatory in Milan.
More than 43,000 people have been killed in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, more than half of them women and children, according to Palestinian health officials, who don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants when recording the deaths.
Last month, a mural depicting a survivor of last year’s Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, which killed around 1,200 people in Israel, was vandalized in Milan.