Following the July 8 expulsion of Israeli tourists from a restaurant in the Spanish city of Vigo, a different group of Israelis said they had been followed and intimidated outside their hotel near Barcelona last week.

A group of men had stalked the three Israeli tourists several times during their vacation until, at a certain encounter, the perpetrators, armed with sticks, chased the Israelis on the street in Lloret de Mar. The tourists fortunately made it back to their hotel on time, Israel’s Channel 12 News reported.

In the incident in Vigo, in northern Spain, a server was filmed shouting, “You sons of bitches, you kill people and come here on vacation. Get out of here,” at a group of Israelis. “Long live free Palestine,” and “I’m at your service, Nasrallah,” as the tourists walked away in the direction of the Plaza de Compostela, a local square.

One of the Israelis, four couples on vacation, told the Spanish-Jewish news site Enfoque Judio that the man who accosted the group asked where they were from, to which they answered without hesitation.

“I want to be clear: we weren’t afraid. When he asked us where we were from, we proudly told him we were Israeli ,” Shlomo Sror, 58, said about the incident on the terrace of the Mimassa restaurant in Vigo.

The incident, which was filmed and went viral, prompted at least one Madrid resident, Alfredo Natan, to file a police complaint for discrimination, Enfoque Judio reported.

The Action and Communication on the Middle East (ACOM) group in Spain also initiated a legal case against the restaurant, the European Jewish Press reported.

On Monday, Spain Observatory against Antisemitism—an entity co-founded by the country’s Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain (FCJE)—published its annual report for 2024, in which it documented 193 incidents – a record tally that constitutes a 321% increase over 2023 and an increase of 567% over 2022.

Most of these acts documented were linked to the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, the report said.

In May, an Israeli government ministry accused authorities in Spain, along with Ireland and South Africa, of enabling antisemitism through inflammatory rhetoric on Israel.

The accusations appeared in the “State of Antisemitism Report for 2024,” published by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism.

Spain, Ireland and South Africa, which have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, were said to be “Countries that enable antisemitism through their selective criticism of Israel and abuse of the language of human rights,” as the report’s authors phrased it.

Image - JNS/The Israelis who were chased out of a restaurant in Vigo, Spain on July 8, 2025. Photo courtesy to Shlomo Sror/Enfoque Judio.