PARIS (JTA) — The French kitchenware maker Tefal removed references to “Palestine” from three of its websites following earlier complaints over Israel’s omission from the firm’s online publications.
The removal of “Palestine” from the Middle East versions of the firm’s website seems to have occurred sometime this week, following a publication by the news site lemondejuif.info, which reported that Tefal had omitted its Israeli resellers from the online lists of its Middle East service providers while it kept references to “Palestine.”
A Tefal representative told JTA on Friday that Israel’s omission from the firm’s Middle East websites in English, French and Farsi was the result of a “technical problem that will be fixed.”
The websites were altered sometime after Oct. 19 to omit any reference also to “Palestine,” as cached versions of the same websites showed. And the lemondejuif.info website documented one Middle East website, the one n French, as referencing “Palestine” as late as Monday.
According to the Tefal represenative, Caroline Simon, Israel was omitted from Tefal’s international website in English, “because of a techincal error, which has been corrected and for which we are sorry.” The other versions will be fixed in the near future, she said.
The firm’s international website also lists a reseller based in east Jerusalem as its representative in the Palestinian Territories, though Simon said “this does not represent any position on the issue of Jerusalem by Tefal.”
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