DUBAI (Middle East Eye) – Flights between and the Israeli-occupied territories and Dubai could be halted within the week as a result of disputes over ‘security arrangements’.
Senior Zionist officials told Israel’s Walla News that flights to Dubai could stop on 8 February after the Shin Bet espionage agency, which handles security for the occupying regime’s airports, raised concerns about the security of the journeys.
Shin Bet cited an upcoming decision by Dubai to change the city airport’s arrangements on that day, according to the report.
“In recent months, disputes have been discovered at the security level between the competent bodies in Dubai and the Israeli aviation security system,” said Shin Bet.
The service also said that, should the flights to Dubai be halted, it will look into the possibility of rerouting the flights to Abu Dhabi.
Negotiations were underway to resolve the situation.
A source told Haaretz that if flights to the UAE were halted, UAE airlines would be stopped from landing in the occupied territories, which would prevent Zionist companies from suffering financial losses as well as applying pressure to the Emirati authorities to improve security.
The dispute marks a wobble in the relationship between the two regimes, which signed a normalization agreement in 2020.
On 31 January, Zionist president Isaac Herzog spoke at Dubai’s Expo 2020 world fair on the first presidential visit to the United Arab Emirates, despite the Persian Gulf state overnight saying it had been targeted by a ballistic missile fired by Yemeni forces. The UAE became the first Persian Gulf state to normalize relations with the occupying regime under a U.S.-brokered agreement, dubbed the “Abraham Accords,” in 2020. Persian Gulf neighbor Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan then followed.