Israeli Staff Protests Red Sea Hotel’s Sale to Club Med Chain

Israeli hotel employees barricaded themselves in a luxury Red Sea hotel along with their families and threatened Monday to burn it down to protest its lease to a French resort chain.

An estimated 120 employees occupied the Laromme Hotel in Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba about one mile north of the Egyptian border, to back up demands that the owners scrap the lease with the Club Mediterranee company and rescind layoff notices.

“We will not let a single French worker in here. We will burn down the hotel,” Aryeh Snir, a workers’ representative, told a reporter by telephone. Snir said the workers will not leave until they have their jobs back.

The managing director of the company that owns Laromme, Amram Aharoni, said the workers were fired because they launched a wildcat strike last week, even though, he said, they knew that Club Mediterranee had guaranteed jobs to all but 10 of them.