First UAE commercial flight lands in Israel after normalization deal

The first commercial flight from the United Arab Emirates to Israel has landed at Ben-Gurion airport, more than a month after the controversial normalization deal signed between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi.

The Etihad Airways said in a statement on Monday that Flight EY9607 had landed outside Tel Aviv just after 7 am.

Later on Monday, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner carried an Israeli travel and tourism delegation and headed for Abu Dhabi, according to the statement.

Israel and the UAE on August 13 agreed to full normalization of relations.

The UAE and Bahrain signed the controversial agreements to normalize ties with Israel at the White House on September 15, amid outrage across Palestine and the Muslim world.

The first direct flight from Israel to the United Arab Emirates landed in Abu Dhabi on August 31, carrying US and Israeli officials. Just hours before the El Al plane landed, two separate explosions rocked the UAE’s capital, Abu Dhabi, and its tourism hub Dubai, leaving a number of people dead and injured.

Blasts hit Dubai, Abu Dhabi ahead of first flight from Israel

Three people killed and several people injured in two separate explosions in the UAE before the first direct flight with Israel was to enter the country.

Israel, Bahrain establish diplomatic ties

Israel and Bahrain on Sunday formally declared they had established diplomatic ties.

Israeli and Bahraini officials signed eight bilateral accords for mutual cooperation in various fields, including civil aviation, communications, agricultural and technology, at a ceremony in Manama.

They also signed a “Joint Communiqué on the establishment of diplomatic, peaceful, and friendly relations” in which the two sides vowed not to take hostile actions against one another and to act against hostile actions by third parties.

The first-ever nonstop El Al flight from Israel to Bahrain landed in Manama on Sunday, carrying a joint US-Israeli delegation.

Israel’s occupation, not Iran, region’s main problem: Israeli lawmaker

Ayman Odeh, a member of Israel’s Knesset (MK) and the head of the majority-Arab Joint List alliance, condemned the recent normalization deals, saying they were based on a “twisted logic,” and insisted that the Palestinian issue, rather than Iran, should be the region’s main concern.

Asked during an interview with Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen TV channel why 13 of the Joint List’s 15 lawmakers had voted against the agreements on Thursday, Odeh said the deals “are based on a flawed assumption: that the fundamental issue in the East is the Iranian question, and not the Palestinian question, and that there must be an alliance” against it.

But, he said, “practically, the Israeli occupation is the fundamental problem. All this talk of ‘combating Iran,’ we cannot accept this twisted logic, either morally or nationally.”

The US-brokered deals make the UAE and Bahrain the third and fourth Arab states to move to normalize ties since Israel signed treaties with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994.

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