The villa is stunning. The private swimming pool; the lush, landscaped terrace with firepit; the long dining table with its expansive balcony view; the pingpong table; the piano.
But the jewel in the crown, according to the Airbnb listing, is the experience of watching the sun rise over the nearby mountains from the luxury of the generous master bedroom.
The villa with views of the Judean mountains is in a settlement located on land seized from Palestinians and considered illegal under international humanitarian law.
Only a handful of Palestinians are allowed to enter this, and other, Israeli settlements in the West Bank, usually as labourers with special permits.
Exclusive analysis carried out by the Guardian found 760 rooms being advertised in hotels, apartments and other holiday rentals in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, on two of the world’s most popular tourism websites.
Taken together, the listings that appear on either Airbnb or Booking.com could host more than 2,000 people as of August 2024. The villa was just one of them.
“Tekoa is a quiet, respectful and diverse, residential community,” reads the listing. There is no mention of the recent confrontations just outside the town, involving guns, clubs, knives and dogs, which have forced neighbouring Palestinians off their land. In a four-mile radius around Tekoa at least 100 Palestinians have been forced out since 2023. The rate of violence and land grabs in the area has escalated dramatically since the start of the war in Gaza.
Despite the recent violence, Tekoa – an area known for its natural beauty, organic farms, the nearby Israeli-administered Nahal Tekoa nature reserve and Herodion national park – was the settlement in the West Bank with the highest number of listed holiday rentals on Airbnb outside East Jerusalem.
In total the Guardian identified almost 350 properties – 321 of them houses, apartments or rooms listed on Airbnb, and 26 hotels on Booking.com – across the West Bank including East Jerusalem, as of 30 August 2024.
Hotel rooms or holiday rentals listed on both sites were counted only once. Duplicates were removed by assigning holiday lets (those in apartments and houses) as Airbnbs and hotel rooms as Booking.com. Looking at listings instead of properties, there were 402 in total across the West Bank including East Jerusalem – 350 on Airbnb and 52 on Booking.com.
The Airbnb listings found by the Guardian analysis include 18 situated in outposts – settlements considered illegal under international law and also not officially authorised by the Israeli government and against Israeli law.
‘War crimes are not a tourist attraction’
By operating in settlements, multinational companies including Booking.com and Airbnb are violating international law, human rights activists warn. Booking.com and Airbnb are among 16 non-Israeli companies identified by the UN as having ties to Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
“Any company doing business in Israel’s illegal settlements is enabling a war crime and helping to prop up Israel’s system of apartheid,” Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty International UK’s crisis response manager, said in response to the Guardian’s findings.
“With Israeli military forces and settlers having killed and injured huge numbers of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank including East Jerusalem in the last 15 months, tourist companies are making themselves complicit in a blood-soaked system of Israeli war crimes and systematic repression.
“War crimes are not a tourist attraction – Airbnb, Booking.com and the wider business community should immediately sever all links with Israel’s illegal occupation and ongoing annexation of Palestinian territory.”
Sari Bashi, programme director at Human Rights Watch, said that, in allowing properties in Israeli settlements to be listed on their sites, “Airbnb and Booking.com are contributing to land grabs, crippling movement restrictions and even the forced displacement of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, abuses that Israeli authorities commit in order to maintain oppression and domination over Palestinians as part of the crime against humanity of apartheid”.
“Businesses should not enable, facilitate, or profit from serious violations of international law. The time has come for both companies to stop doing business in the occupied territories on stolen land.”
The companies’ hosting of listings on occupied Palestinian territory has also attracted legal challenges. Dutch prosecutors are continuing to investigate a criminal complaint against Booking.com over its listing of rental properties in Israeli settlements, with no decision made as to whether to take further action.
The Dutch non-profit organisation the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (Somo) filed the complaint with the Dutch public prosecutor in November 2023. In the complaint Booking.com is accused of “profiting from war crimes by facilitating the rental of vacation homes on land stolen from the indigenous Palestinian population”.
Last month the group submitted fresh evidence to Dutch prosecutors alleging that since filing the initial complaint, Booking.com had “significantly expanded” its listings in the occupied West Bank.
Lydia de Leeuw of Somo, who leads the complaint, told the Guardian: “We can see from the continued [Booking.com] listings … in the occupied Palestinian territory that they have no intention whatsoever of stopping doing what they are doing.”
In a landmark advisory opinion in July 2024 the UN’s international court of justice ordered Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories, saying that its presence there violated international law. It also advised member states not to recognise the occupation as legal, or to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation.
West Bank tourism in the holiday rental era
The settler claim that the stolen land is now Israeli can be seen in the Airbnb listings. Two in five Airbnb properties on Israeli settlements listed their location as Israel – not the occupied Palestinian territories – in their title, addresses or location details, and only two listings explicitly mentioned they were on Palestinian land. Three-quarters of them mentioned the name of the settlement in the title, name or location.
As of 30 August, just five of the 26 hotels listed in Israeli settlements on Booking.com explicitly mentioned in their address or description that they were located on Palestinian territory.
Airbnb announced in November 2018 it would remove about 200 listings in the occupied West Bank, but the company reversed its decision months later after Israeli lawyers filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of hosts and others against removing the listings. The company has said it donates profits from the area to aid organisations.
A 2019 Amnesty International report said the Israeli government had been increasing its support to the tourism industry linked to settlements and it has constructed “many of its settlements close to archaeological sites to make the link between the modern state of Israel and its Jewish history explicit”.
“The designation of certain locations as tourist sites is also used by the Israeli government to justify the takeover of Palestinian land and homes”, resulting in forced evictions and restrictions on Palestinians to expand their homes or cultivate the land, the report said.
Israel’s policy of exploiting historical and religious sites as well as areas of natural beauty, designated nature reserves and national parks on the West Bank for international tourism went hand in hand with de-developing the Palestinian tourism industry, said a 2017 report on the Israeli tourism sector by the Israeli NGO Who Profits. For example, only 0.3% of licensed tour guides permitted to lead tours in Israel and the West Bank are Palestinians, despite nearly 40% of tourist sites visited by international tourists to Israel in 2014 being located in occupied Palestinian territory.
Violence in the West Bank since October 2023
Since the 2023 Gaza war began, violence has increased significantly in the West Bank. A total of 881 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in the 10 years before 7 October 2023, and 877 have been killed in the 16 months since to 11 Feb 2025, according to UN data. Out of that number, 857 were killed by the Israeli military. That compares with 32 Israeli deaths in the West Bank since October 2023, 21 of them soldiers.
The destruction of Palestinian properties in the West Bank has also escalated in the past two years, data from B’Tselem shows. Between 2006 and 2024, Israel made 9,700 people homeless in the West Bank by demolishing their houses, a number that reached its highest yearly total in 2024, when 841 properties were demolished and 953 people made homeless.
Airbnb and Booking.com’s responses
Airbnb has refused to disclose how much it has donated to humanitarian organisations since 2019, when it reversed its decision to remove rental listings of homes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Announcing the reversal, the US company said it would transfer all proceeds from all rentals in the West Bank to humanitarian organisations. The proceeds have gone to the Institute for Economics and Peace, an international thinktank headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
An Airbnb spokesperson said: “Since 2019, Airbnb has donated all profits generated from host activity in the West Bank to an international nonprofit. We will continue this approach as part of our global framework on disputed territories.”
A spokesperson for Booking.com said: “The war in Gaza and the increasing violence in the West Bank, Lebanon and Israel are heartbreaking, and we have been terribly saddened by the extreme pain, suffering and losses that so many people in the region are enduring. Our thoughts are with all those impacted and we sincerely hope for an end to the violence.
“Our mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world and as such we believe it’s up to travellers to choose where they want and need to go. It’s not our place to decide where someone can or cannot travel.
“Unfortunately, there are many parts of the world where there are conflicts or disputes, which is why we want to make sure travellers are well-informed when making their plans. If a particular region can be categorised as disputed or impacted by conflict, we add information to our platform to help ensure that travellers can make a well-informed choice, or at least consult their government’s official travel advisories as part of their decision-making process.”
Additional graphics work by Tural Ahmedzade and Pablo Gutiérrez
