Some 270 citizens that Spain repatriated this Tuesday night from Israel with a first military plane have completed the boarding procedures from the Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, and are passing air controls to take off at 11:00 p.m. local time ( 20:00 GMT), as planned.
With suitcases and their belongings, hundreds of Spanish citizens, most of them tourists and some residents of Israel, gathered this afternoon in the departure terminal of the Israeli airport to make the final arrangements with personnel from the Spanish embassy and the emergency consular authorities to their evacuation.
Some of them were tourists, who these days were also caught by surprise by Saturday's attack from the Gaza Strip by the Islamist group Hamas, which led the region into a major armed conflict.
“I arrived in Israel ten days ago to visit a friend” and “on Saturday we woke up to the news of the attacks,” Jorge Santesteban, a young man from Madrid, told EFE who, after seeing “the seriousness of what happened,” began to look for ways to return to Spain.
Santesteban says he felt safe because when the attack from Gaza occurred, he was in Eilat, the southernmost city in the country, where the rockets launched by the Palestinian militias that did hit other parts of Israel did not reach either. “We decided to stay there and keep calm and the next day I went to Tel Aviv and started looking for flights,” he added.
But the flight he found for this Tuesday was canceled and in the morning he contacted the Spanish embassy in Israel, which proceeded to process his repatriation with the military plane that will take the Spaniards home tonight.
Pablo García and Juan Pérez, both long-time residents of Israel and employees of an Israeli company for which they worked on the construction of a gas pipeline in the Dimona area, in the south of the country and dozens of kilometers from Gaza, will also take that flight. , where sirens sounded and rockets arrived.
Another 200 will also be evacuated
“We felt a little disconcerted about what was going to happen; from the first moment we didn't go to work, and when they sent us back to work on Monday, we decided to give up and go home,” says Juan Pérez, who Just like his partner, he decided to resign due to the insecurity situation. “The best thing is to leave Israel for now until it calms down and then we'll see,” says Pérez.
This same Tuesday, the Spanish Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, announced the sending of two military planes, and after this first one, pending departure from Israel, it is expected that there will be another to evacuate more than 200 Spaniards who saw their commercial flights canceled .
The Government of Spain is not considering the evacuation of the approximately 10,000 Spaniards who live permanently between Israel and the Palestinian territories, but it is considering sending a military plane to carry those displaced for tourism or business.
Many commercial flights arriving and leaving Israel have been canceled due to the armed conflict and the alerts due to the rockets launched from the Gaza Strip, which also reached the outskirts of Tel Aviv this Tuesday.
Ben Gurion Airport has seen a lot of traffic with passengers from countries like Italy or Mexico who are being repatriated by the respective governments.