An EgyptAir flight touched down Sunday, 3 October on Israel’s Ben-Gurion runway, marking the first commercial flight between the two countries since the peace-treaty of 1979.
For decades, flights from Egypt to Israel were undertaken by EgyptAir’s subsidiary, Air Sinai. The planes were unmarked, traveling without the Egyptian flag in order to avoid targeting. These flights operated throughout the 1980s and into the 2000s, but were “kept inconspicuous amid lingering hostilities” between the nations.
According to the Times of Israel and Ahram Online, EgyptAir is set to operate four weekly direct flights between Cairo and Tel Aviv as of October 2021.
In celebration, the Israeli Embassy in Cairo tweeted that this schedule is “an important and welcome sign of strengthening bilateral ties between the two countries, especially economic relations.”
The flight took place two weeks after Prime Minister Naftali Bennett met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Sharm el-Sheikh, marking the first visit of an Israeli PM on Egyptian soil in over a decade.
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