A Spanish mayor on Sunday invited anti-Israel activists to launch the annual San Fermin Festival in Pamplona, where they lit a rocket-shaped firework while shouting “Long live free Palestine” as revelers held up a giant banner that read “destroy Israel.”
The Israeli embassy in Spain condemned the incident as a sign of “an obsession” with the Jewish state.
The traditional week-long festival features the well-known Running of the Bulls, in which the animals are let loose in sectioned-off parts of Pamplona as people run ahead of them.
Wearing keffiyehs, the activists from the anti-Israel Yala Nafarroa con Palestina organization led the festival’s opening ceremony. One of the activists, Lidón Soriano, told the audience: “There’s a genocide,” prompting applause. “Free Palestine,” she screamed, as thousands of people gathered on Pamplona’s main square jumped up and down waving ceremonial red bandanas, some emblazoned with a drawing of the borders of Israel labelled as “Palestine.”
She and another activist, Eduardo Ibero, lit the fuse of a rocket-shaped firework, whose launch traditionally signals the official start of the event. As the firework was launched, Soriano screamed into the microphone: “Long live Free Palestine,” drawing fresh applause.
Cómo me duele ver que Pamplona está gobernada por defensores del terrorismo de ETA y de Hamas. Me entran ganas de vomitar cuando veo el arranque de estos Sanfermines. pic.twitter.com/OWT3b7jJ8r
— Javier Negre (@javiernegre10) July 6, 2025
In the plaza below them, thousands huddled around a display made up of individuals dressed in dark colors who stood in the shape of the State of Israel. They later spread a giant banner that read “destroy Israel.”
The lighting of the firework has been a part of the ceremony for many years, but its inclusion in Yala Nafarroa’s nationalist Palestinian message shocked some critics also because of its perceived allusion to the launch of rockets at Israel by Hamas.
“It pains me to see that Pamplona is governed by defenders of ETA and Hamas terrorism. Seeing the start of this year’s San Fermin Festival is making me feel sick to my stomach,” wrote on X Javier Negre, a prominent Spanish journalist who founded the EDATV channel.
ETA was an armed Basque nationalist and far-left separatist terror organization in the Basque Country until it was disbanded in 2018. Pamplona is considered part of the Basque region of Spain.
Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the chairman of the European Jewish Association, referenced in his comment to JNS the many Basque separatist symbols on display at San Fermin.
“For 3,000 years, Jews longed for independence. We won it. That radical independence movements hate us for defending the world’s only Jewish state speaks volumes about their politics and their antisemitism: [To them] everyone can have a country, unless you are Jewish,” he said.
Pamplona’s cultural celebration “was hijacked by hate” in “the latest example of the genocide blood libel that has infected public events from rock concerts to sport events across Europe. It is disturbing, and it’s dangerous,” he added.
“What Palestine has to do with a bull run is a mystery. But you can be sure that no excuse is needed by these far-left terror sympathizers to spread the stuff that bulls leave behind” when it comes to Israel, he said.
Mayor Joseba Asiron expressed his “pride” at the message of “solidarity, rationality and humanity” delivered at the “sweetest moment” of the event, according to the EFE news agency.
Israel’s embassy on X expressed its “disgust” at the event. It is “intolerable that Spanish institutions support individuals or groups whose goal is to incite hatred against Israel and that in no way contribute to peace. This obsession against the Jewish state, especially when it is endorsed by public institutions, is further fueling the growing levels of antisemitism,” the embassy added.
