RIYADH (Dispatches) – In a first, a Zionist commercial flight flew over Saudi Arabia’s airspace to a non-Persian Gulf destination since Riyadh opened its skies to all air carriers, including those of the Zionist regime, last month.
The flight operated by the second-largest Zionist airline Arkia departed Ben Gurion Airport after 1:15 a.m. local time on Tuesday (2215 GMT Monday) and was scheduled to land in the Republic of Seychelles off the coast of East Africa six hours later.
The occupying regime’s media outlets reported that the new route shortened the duration of the flight by 20 minutes.
“Tonight, an Arkia plane will become the first Israeli licensed plane to fly over Saudi Arabia — not to Dubai, but to the Seychelles. The route will go through Jordan in the area of the Dead Sea and turn left to Petra, continuing along Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea shores,” Arkia’s chief pilot Din Gal said in a statement ahead of the flight.
“From there, it will continue on its regular route through Eritrea…We soon hope to see shorter flights to India and Sri Lanka.”
The development comes hours after Lebanon’s Arabic-language al-Mayadeen television news network, citing Zionist media reports, said an Israeli administrative plane (T7-WZZ), in service of Shino Aviation, had landed in the Saudi capital of Riyadh.
The Saudi regime in November 2020 granted permission to Zionist airlines to use its airspace for flights to and from the UAE and Bahrain, in a move seen as a precursor of the normalization of ties between the two sides.
But that authorization was not extended to flights departing and arriving at other destinations until last month as part of a multilateral agreement to transfer control of a pair of Red Sea islands from Egypt to Saudi Arabia that was brokered by the Biden administration.
In mid-July, Saudi Arabia, in an apparent gesture of openness towards the occupying regime, announced that it was lifting restrictions on “all carriers” using its airspace.
The Saudi General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) said in a statement on its Twitter page at the time that the country’s airspace was open to all carriers that meet its requirements for overflights, in line with international conventions that say there should be no discrimination between civil aircraft.