BICOM

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced yesterday that Oman will authorise Israeli aircraft to enter its airspace.

Speaking at a conference for Israeli ambassadors, Netanyahu said: “When I was in Oman, Sultan Qaboos [bin Said] confirmed to me right away that El Al can fly over Oman.” He added: “Therefore, only one small thing remains for us to do,” pointing to Saudi Arabia on a map. He added: “We need to get that El Al can fly over this, and that’s it — we open new markets.”

Earlier this year, Oman and Saudi Arabia allowed Air India to fly through their airspace on the way to Israel. Saudi Arabia has not authorised El Al to fly through its airspace and, without this permission, the ability to fly over Oman is largely symbolic.

After Netanyahu’s visit to Oman, the Omani Foreign Minister told a conference of Arab leaders, “we should consider giving equal treatment to Israel among the other countries in the Middle East.” Netanyahu also said that it was agreed during Chad President Idriss Déby’s visit to Israel that Israeli airlines could fly through Chad’s airspace. He added: “At this time, we can overfly Egypt. We can overfly Chad, that has already been set. And to all appearances, we can also overfly this corner of Sudan,” pointing on a map to the north-western corner of Sudan that borders Egypt, Chad, and Libya.

Netanyahu said that when he met Arab leaders, they told him: “We have security and economic interests and we also want to enjoy the fruits of progress and we will no longer mortgage our normalisation with the State of Israel to the Palestinians’ caprices.’” He explained, however that “this does not mean peace agreements yet, but it certainly says that a situation could be created in which our progress toward normalisation and peace, instead of what we always thought, peace with the Palestinians [in order] to [make peace with] the Arab world, could actually be the reverse.”