COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The Sri Lankan boat guide seen being shoved into the sea by an Israeli tourist, in a video that drew outrage across the country, says the episode was a game among friends and has asked the public to stop making an issue of it.
“A small thing happened. Don’t make it big,” the guide, Senura Rashmika, says in a video he recorded after the incident, according to BBC Sinhala, which obtained the clip from his brother. “I’m the one who pushed them. This is fake news. They have been our friends for a long time. They treated us well.”
The incident took place on Nov. 8 in the sea off Mirissa, a beach resort on the southern coast about 90 miles from Colombo, his brother, Kavindu, told BBC Sinhala. Both brothers work in the tourism trade there. A version of the guide’s clip carrying English and Hebrew subtitles circulated widely on Tuesday.
The original footage was posted by the Russian state broadcaster RT on Nov. 8. It shows the guide sitting on the boat, drinking from a bottle, when a tourist beside him pushes him overboard as others laugh. The video was viewed more than a million times, according to IBTimes UK, and set off a wave of condemnation on social media.
“To tell the truth, it is a misunderstanding,” Kavindu told BBC Sinhala by phone. He said the brothers had known the group since 2018, that its members had helped them set up a restaurant and buy boats, and that they visited every year. “We are like brothers,” he said.
He said the push came during water games while the group was filming. “My brother pushed them. Then they lifted my brother and threw him into the sea. They pushed me in too,” he said. “We climbed back onto the boat.”
The footage was later posted in a group, he said, and someone there took it and turned it into a controversy. “A video taken for fun has become such a big problem,” he said. BBC Sinhala also published a photograph, which it said had been provided to it, of the guide posing with the tourists on the day of the incident.
The police in Kotawila, near Mirissa, looked into the episode after the video spread. Kavindu said the brothers took the tourists to the tourist police station, where the tourists said they were innocent and had been playing. A police spokesman told BBC Sinhala that the guides had described the tourists as their friends, and that there would be no further investigation.
The tourists had given a similar account through Daniel Amram, an Israeli journalist and activist, in a post on X that BBC Sinhala said it had checked. They said the guide knew about the prank and took part, that he was unhurt and that they had not meant to humiliate him. “It was a joke, the worker is fine, it wasn’t meant to be mean,” they said.
Their remark that they were due to enlist in the Israeli military within a month drew further criticism. Kavindu said the group had planned to leave Sri Lanka on Nov. 10. BBC Sinhala said it had tried to reach the tourists for comment.
A section of Sri Lankans remains unconvinced. “If we had gone to Israel and done this, the law of that country would have come down on us,” one Facebook user wrote, according to BBC Sinhala. Others said a sudden push in open water could have caused serious injury or death, from a boat’s propeller or from drowning.
BBC Sinhala said it had not been able to obtain an unedited version of the viral video, or to speak to the guide directly, because he was out on a boat trip with tourists. Jaffna Monitor could not independently verify the accounts.
A Sri Lankan journalist, replying to Mr. Amram’s post, wrote that Sri Lankans are taught not to disturb anyone who is eating or drinking. “It is very sad that a group described as ‘good kids’ did not learn this from their parents or elders,” the journalist wrote.
The episode comes amid long-running friction over Israeli visitors in Sri Lanka’s coastal resort towns. Residents of Arugam Bay, on the southeast coast, and more recently Hiriketiya, in the south, have protested over Israeli-run businesses they say operate illegally, and over a Chabad house opened in Arugam Bay. In August 2025, two Israeli tourists were arrested after an assault on a Sri Lankan man in Arugam Bay.
Israelis make up a small but growing share of the country’s visitors. From January through September, 20,784 Israelis arrived, up 18.4 percent from the same period last year and about 1.2 percent of all foreign arrivals, according to the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. Last year, 24,591 came.
Sri Lanka does not publish tourist spending by nationality. The country earned $3.22 billion from 2.36 million visitors last year. If Israelis spent at that national average, last year’s arrivals would have brought in about $34 million. The government extended visa-free entry to Israeli nationals in 2025, a decision activists have urged it to reverse.
Israelis and their defenders say the backlash has turned into hostility toward Israelis as a group, pointing to a 2024 Israeli travel warning over a terrorism threat and to protests and threats against a Chabad house in Hiriketiya this year.
