An Israeli-chartered Air India flight from New Delhi landed late in the night March 26 at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, carrying 316 passengers. In a statement released by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, spokesperson Lior Hayat explained that the Israeli Embassy and consulates in India had been working more than a week to enable the Israeli travelers, most of them young people who had finished their army service, to board the flight and come home. A similar flight was organized the day before by Israel’s ambassador in Bogota, Chris Cantor, bringing back from Colombia some 70 young tourists. On March 24, a special El Al flight carried 230 Israelis who had been traveling in Australia and New Zealand back to Tel Aviv from Perth. It was the first-ever direct flight from Australia to Israel and took 17 hours.
All these flights and several others reflect ongoing efforts by the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem to help Israelis stranded abroad as countries have closed borders and canceled flights as a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The efforts of the ministry seem to have stopped at nothing, with complex operations and out-of-the-box solutions such as the use of a private airplane that on March 26 picked up 23 Israelis who had been traveling in Bolivia and transferred them to a location where a Bolivia military airplane waited for them. The military plane then flew the Israelis all the way to Sao Paolo, Brazil, where they flew commercial back to Israel. In Costa Rica, Ambassador Amir Ofek managed to gather travelers from five Central American countries to board the first-ever flight from San Jose to Tel Aviv.
