47 Israelis stranded in Bosnia after passports end up in waste bin

The tourists were due to return to Israel on Saturday, but their stays have been extended by at least several days, Ynet reported.

By Canaan Lindor, JNS

Dozens of Israeli tourists were stranded in Bosnia and Herzegovina on Sunday after their passports were thrown away in what a local newspaper described as an accident.

The CRNA Hronika news site posted footage on Sunday it said it obtained from a hotel lobby in Sarajevo showing a large envelope dropping from a filing cabinet into what looks to be a waste bin at a reception desk while an employee sorts papers nearby, but without a line of sight to the envelope.

The time stamp on the video says it was captured at 1 a.m. on Saturday.

The news site said the footage was of the passports of 47 Israeli tourists ending up in the trash bin, before they were taken away to a landfill. Efforts to retrieve them have thus far been to no avail.

The tourists were due to return to Israel on Saturday, but their stays have been extended by at least several days, Ynet reported.

The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem said in a statement on Sunday: “The matter is known and is being handled by the Department for Israelis in Distress Abroad and Israel’s embassy in Belgrade.”

The incident in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where half of the population is Muslim, comes amid a spate of incidents in Europe in which Israelis were harassed, threatened and assaulted, often by Muslims, by attackers citing Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

But according to Oslobođenje, the oldest daily newspaper in circulation in the Bosnia and Herzegovina, the incident in Sarajevo was an accident.