The director of the Jewish summer camp was arrested. Vueling claimed the group engaged in 'disruptive behaviour'. Reports suggest they had been 'singing Hebrew songs'.
A low-cost airline owned by a British-Spanish firm has claimed that 50 French Jewish children were removed from a flight and the director of their summer programme arrested for “disruptive behaviour”, with relatives of the children saying that they had been singing Hebrew songs.
Vueling, which is owned by IAG, a multinational airline holding company with its corporate headquarters in England, issued a statement on Thursday morning in relation to “a group of teenage passengers on board flight VY8166 from Valencia to Paris Orly”, which it said had been “disembarked for disruptive behaviour”.
Video footage of a woman on the floor of an airport terminal being arrested by Spanish police led to significant outrage on social media. Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister, Amichai Chikli, shared footage of the arrest, saying: “The woman who was arrested and beaten is the director of the Kinneret summer camp. Fifty Jewish French children, aged 10 – 15, were singing Hebrew songs on the plane.”
Chikli went on to allege that “the airline crew said that Israel is a terrorist state and forced the children off the aircraft; they are now in Valencia, waiting to return to France”.
In its statement, the airline said: “We categorically deny any suggestion that our crew’s decision related to the religion of the passengers involved”, claiming that “the actions of the on-board staff were solely in response to behaviour that compromised the integrity of the flight, as well as the safety of the passengers and the operation as a whole.”
The mother of one of the young passengers told Israel’s i24 TV channel that the children had been singing in Hebrew when the flight crew told them to desist, threatening to call the police if they continued. Despite the children stopping, the police were still called, with the director of the camp subsequently arrested.
The airline statement claimed that “a group of passengers engaged in highly disruptive behaviour and adopted a very confrontational attitude…this group mishandled emergency equipment and actively disrupted the mandatory safety demonstration…the crew, acting in accordance with Vueling procedures, requested the intervention of the Guardia Civil, who, after assessing the situation, decided to disembark the group to prioritise the safety of the rest of the passengers.”
A video taken on a tour bus this morning in Spain shows one of the camp counsellors speaking to French Jewish children from the tour group due to get on another flight back to France, saying “Anything religious, like a chai [a necklace with the Hebrew word for ‘life’]…kippot, we take it off, tzitzit, we tuck inside trousers…tefillin, you put in your luggage…we leave no distinctive religious symbol…we will board the plane, there is not a word, not a noise…no-one gets up with out my permission, not even to use the toilet…we will not give these antisemites the opportunity to kick us off the plane.”
Spain has been a key European critic of Israeli actions in Gaza. The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, has repeatedly accused Israel of “genocide”, called for Eurovision to boycott the country and has strongly criticised the EU for not suspending its trade agreement with Israel. Observers have noted that Sanchez, the leader of a minority coalition clinging onto power during an extended and wide-ranging corruption scandal, is almost completely reliant on his fiercely anti-Israel far-left coalition partners to remain as the country’s leader.
According to a report in the Israel Hayom paper, Spanish media regularly compare Israel to the Nazis, with members of the country’s small Jewish community now regularly hiding signs of their Jewish identity in public.
24/07/2025 by JEWISH NEWS
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