The video that Shalev Biton posted about his participation in an Adidas campaign was no longer available on his Instagram account as of Sunday, after several days of boycott calls directed at the company and a campaign of mass reporting against his personal page.
Biton, an Israeli veteran who lost his left leg to anti-tank fire near the Gaza border in 2021, announced his involvement on August 26. In a Hebrew-language post he said that since returning to running he had repeatedly been forced to buy a full pair of shoes when he could use only one, and that this had now changed. The post made no reference to his military service or to how he lost his leg.
He was one of 11 disabled athletes featured in a series of advertisements produced by Adidas Israel for the company's Hyperboost running shoes, according to the Jerusalem Post. The posters were not used outside Israel.
The service the campaign promoted is not an Israeli initiative. Adidas launched Single Shoe in Europe in January, allowing customers who need only one shoe to buy it at half the price of a pair, and extended it to markets in the Middle East some months later. In a statement responding to the criticism, the company said the service was developed in cooperation with communities and professional organizations including the British Paralympic Association, and described it as a global effort to expand accessibility rather than a program built for Israeli soldiers.
The boycott campaign gathered force over the weekend under the hashtag #BoycottAdidas, with individual posts drawing hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of views. Prominent pro-Palestinian accounts including Eye on Palestine joined the campaign, and Europe Palestine Network and The Times of Palestine issued a joint statement accusing the company of partnering with criminals while ignoring victims.
Spanish actor and well-known Israel-hater Javier Bardem shared several boycott posts to his Instagram Stories on Sunday.
Several widely shared posts contained claims that are not accurate. Multiple accounts described Biton as a soldier in the current Gaza war. He was wounded on May 12, 2021, during Operation Guardian of the Walls, when an anti-tank missile fired from Gaza struck a military vehicle near the border. Sgt. Omer Tabib was killed in the same attack. Biton, who served in the Nahal Brigade, had his left leg amputated after a series of surgeries and later returned to running with a prosthetic. One account presented the Single Shoe service as a program created for Israeli soldiers who lost legs in Gaza, a claim the company's own statement contradicts.
The campaign also reached Biton personally. On Saturday night he posted to his Instagram story that his account was under sustained attack from pro-Palestinian users and faced possible closure after a flood of reports and hostile comments, and asked his followers to help keep the page online.
It is not the first time Adidas has been caught in the conflict. In July 2024 the company withdrew and revised a campaign featuring Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid for its SL72 trainers, following criticism of the shoe's association with the 1972 Munich Olympics, and later apologized to Hadid over its handling of the episode.
