Days after it made a commercial passenger flight to the UAE, Israel’s national carrier El Al has announced that it will start cargo flights to Dubai on September 16.

The flight is scheduled to take off from Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv, the airline said in a statement on September 3. Unlike the direct passenger flight on August 30 which flew over Saudi airspace, the cargo service will fly via Liege in Belgium to Dubai, the Israeli airline said.

“The weekly El Al cargo flight to Dubai will enable Israeli companies connectivity in import and export from and to Dubai, as well as Asia in transfer from Dubai,” El Al said. The Boeing 747 aircraft will be carrying “agricultural and high-tech equipment” from Israel to the UAE on a regular Wednesday fixture in the future; the return flights from Dubai will be on Fridays.

El Al has been hit hard by the pandemic and is in advanced negotiations for a government bailout to avoid bankruptcy.

Saudi airspace opens up
Meanwhile, the UAE General Civil Aviation Authority confirmed on September 2 that Saudi Arabia has opened its airspace to all flights from and to the UAE.

The same day, Saudi and US officials reviewed prospects for the peace process in the region and the need to resume negotiations between the Palestinian and Israeli sides to achieve a just and lasting peace. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, who is the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, met Senior Advisrr to the US President, Jared Kushner, and his accompanying delegation to discuss partnership between the two countries.

Kushner, who was in the kingdom after a historic meeting between UAE, US and Israeli officials on August 31- September 1, said “fully normalised relations” between Israel and Saudi Arabia were an “inevitability”.

Saudi Arabia, like Israel and the UAE, consider Iran a common foe and maintains close ties with Washington.

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The first flight to the UAE from Israel landed on the tarmac of Abu Dhabi airport at 3:38 p.m. local time on August 31 carrying a delegation from Israel and the United States, following the historic August 13 accord between the two countries.

The chartered El Al airliner carried US President’s son-in-law and senior Middle East adviser Jared Kushner, US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, and Head of Israel’s National Security Council Meir Ben-Shabbat.  Expressing his happiness to be heading the Israeli delegation, Ben-Shabbat read his statement in both Arabic and Hebrew.

“This is a historic flight and we hope that this would start a more historic journey for the Middle East and beyond,” Kushner said. “The future should not be determined by the past.”

Flight LY971 – numbered to represent the UAE’s international dialling code – made the three-hour trip, crossing Saudi Arabian airspace, normally blocked to Israeli air traffic. The return flight will be numbered LY972, after Israel’s international dialling code.

The Boeing 737 flight would have taken seven hours if it had not been allowed to use Saudi airspace, its captain Tal Becker said. Israel and Saudi Arabia do not share diplomatic relations.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it the “first ever Israeli commercial flight”  to the UAE, and the UAE Foreign Ministry termed it the same.

The plane flew the flags of all three nations and had “peace” newly stencilled above the pilot’s side window in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

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