By IRNA,
London : The Israel Government Tourist Office (IGTO) has lost an appeal against a British ban on a misleading holiday advert which described the Western Wall as part of Israel.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld a complaint in April that the photographs of East Jerusalem destinations were actually in the occupied territories.
An image on the advert for holidays in Israel showed a picture of the wall, with the gold Dome of al-Aqsa mosque in the background, stating that tourists can “travel the entire length of Israel in six hours.”
“After careful consideration, including of a report from the Independent Reviewer, the ASA Council has decided not to overturn its original upheld decision. The original adjudication will remain unchanged,” a spokesman from the ASA said.
In April, the watchdog said that readers of the advert were likely to assume that all the places featured in the ad were within the state of Israel.
“The status of the occupied territory of the West Bank [is] the subject of much international dispute, and because we considered that the ad implied that the part of East Jerusalem featured in the image was part of the state of Israel, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead,” the ASA ruled.
The poster ban comes less than a year the Israeli Tourism Ministry was again censored for using an adverting campaign that wiped the occupied West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights off the map.
Tourism posters showing the false Israeli map started to appear at London underground stations in May last year, but within a week were being prematurely removed following a series of protests made to the ASA.