British Airways suspends flights to and from Israel over safety concerns as plane from Heathrow to Tel Aviv is diverted back to London moments before landing
British Airways has suspended flights to and from Israel because of safety concerns.
The announcement from the airline comes after a BA flight from London to Israel was forced to turn back just moments before it reached Tel Aviv due to security concerns.
Flight BA165 had to change course back to Heathrow amid Hamas launching a fresh wave of rocket attacks.
A BA spokesman said: ‘Safety is always our highest priority and following the latest assessment of the situation, we’re suspending our flights to and from Tel Aviv.
‘We’re contacting customers booked to travel to or from Tel Aviv to apologise for the inconvenience and offer options including a full refund and rebooking with another airline or with British Airways at a later date.
‘We continue to monitor the situation in the region closely.’
It has joined many international airlines who have suspended flights to Tel Aviv since the shocking attack by Hamas on Israel on Saturday.
The BA165 flight (not pictured) had almost reached Tel Aviv when it was forced to turn back to London Heathrow due to safety concerns
It comes after Hamas launched a fresh wave of rocket attacks on Israel which included bombing a child development centre (pictured: Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City)
After flight BA165A was diverted, BA said: ‘Safety is always our highest priority and we’ve taken the decision to return our Tel Aviv flight to Heathrow.’
Flight-tracking website Flightradar showed the flight was near northern city Haifa when it made a U-turn. It was due to land at 3.05pm.
A spokesperson for Israel’s airports authority said rockets were flying around Tel Aviv at the time but were not an immediate threat to the flight or to Ben Gurion Airport.
The diversion back to Britain was the pilot’s decision and no other flights have been diverted, the spokesperson said.
Other carriers such as easyJet and Wizz Air suspended flights to and from Tel Aviv after the Hamas attacks on Saturday, meaning UK citizens trying to fly home from Israel face a struggle to book flights.
Read more: Rocket slams into Israeli hospital and supermarket in new wave of strikes from Gaza – as Benjamin Netanyahu posts horrifying image of blood-soaked child’s bed and labels Hamas ‘worse than ISIS’
EasyJet usually serves Gatwick, Luton and Manchester airports from the Israeli city but has paused operations on those routes.
Wizz Air, which normally connects Israel with Gatwick and Luton, has also suspended those flights.
Virgin Atlantic is continuing to operate flights between Heathrow and Tel Aviv.
BA, owned by IAG, had said earlier on Monday it was monitoring the situation in Israel very closely but would continue to operate some flights, but has now announced it is suspending flights to and from Israel.
The Government has not provided an estimate on how many UK citizens are in Israel.
A travel industry source said the number of UK tourists in Israel is low.
Israel’s ministry of tourism said it is ‘committed to ensuring that all tourists visiting Israel are safe and informed’.
It added it is operating a ‘hotline via WhatsApp for tourists’ on +972 55 972 6931.
Smoke billows from a fire that broke out after a rocket attack from Gaza in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon
Israelis take cover from the incoming rocket fire from the Gaza Strip in Ashkelon, southern Israel
A picture shows a crater made by a rocket fired from Gaza outside a supermarket in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon
Israelis look at the damage by rocket fire fired from the Gaza Strip in Ashkelon, southern Israel
It comes after Hamas launched a fresh wave of rocket attacks across southern Israel, including a child development centre, even as Gaza holds its breath with Israel’s Defence Forces massing hundreds of thousands of troops on its border.
Read more: EXCLUSIVE: Brits in Israel blast Foreign Office for leaving them ‘stranded’ and forcing them to pay thousands of pounds to escape the war
Shocking images and videos out of Israel’s southern city of Ashkelon purportedly showed how the Child Development wing of the Barzilai Medical Centre suffered a direct hit which reduced parts of the building to rubble.
A spokeswoman for the centre said: ‘The child development centre at the Barzilai hospital in Ashkelon suffered a direct hit by a projectile from Gaza,’ while Deputy Director Dr. Gili Givati told Israeli public radio: ‘The development centre was completely destroyed.’
Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes demolished entire Palestinian neighbourhoods on Wednesday, and hospitals in the Gaza Strip are struggling to treat the injured with dwindling medical supplies as the IDF encircle the 25-mile-long swathe of land ahead of a planned invasion.
Gaza’s two million residents lost electricity this afternoon as the enclave’s sole power plant ran out of fuel and shut down, energy officials said, deepening the crisis inside the 140-square-mile territory that is currently besieged by Israeli forces.
‘The only power plant in the Gaza Strip stopped functioning at 2pm,’ the authority’s head said in a statement, having earlier warned that it was running short of fuel.
The war has claimed at least 2,200 lives on both sides, and is only expected to escalate further from this point.
Humanitarian groups have pleaded for the creation of corridors for the delivery of aid ahead of the likely Israeli assault.
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