1st-ever EgyptAir flight lands at Israel airport

Tel Aviv, Oct 4 (IANS) A first-ever commercial flight of EgyptAir landed at the Ben Gurion International Airport in Israel, according to a local media report.

EgyptAir's new route will include four weekly round-trip flights between Cairo International Airport and Ben Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv, Xinhua news agency quoted the report as saying.

Egypt and Israel signed a historic peace treaty in 1979, and direct flights between the two countries began a year later by Israel's leading airline El Al.

EgyptAir, on the other hand, preferred for political reasons not to fly to Israel, and established a subsidiary Air Sinai in 1982, which has since operated direct flights between the two countries.

In 2012, El Al stopped flying to Cairo for economic reasons, after the number of passengers travelling between the two countries has sharply decreased.

In September, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett became the first serving Israeli leader in more than a decade to visit Egypt during which he met President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Following his visit, Bennett said he'd held "an important and very good meeting" with the Egyptian leader, in which the two "laid the foundation for deep ties moving forward", reports The Times of Israel.

The last time an Israeli leader visited Cairo was in 2011 when former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.