The “Alas de Zion”, the official plane of the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamín Netanyahu, avoided this Thursday Surcar the airspace of France and Spain on its route to New York drawing a large rodeo on the Mediterranean Sea: 600 kilometers more, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. There is no official explanation of that unusual journey, but several Israeli media have linked it this Friday with a possibility that the Israeli government shows of considering less and less distant: that one of the countries whose heavens has avoided surfing on this trip stops him if his plane was forced to make an emergency landing.
An arrest warrant for war crimes and against humanity against Netanyahu for the offensive and hunger in Gaza. For international justice, Israeli prime minister is a fugitive.
In its previous displacements to the United States since the issuance of that arrest warrant, the wings of Zion had already avoided the airspace of Spain. From the beginning, the Government of Pedro Sánchez expressed his willingness to comply with what was issued by the Hague Court, which legally forces the 124 signatories of the Treaty of Rome, including all members of the European Union. The plane did fly over France in April, after Paris expressed its rejection of the arrest order of the TPI and ensure that it would not stop the Israeli president.
The context has changed since then. A French diplomat has declared Haaretz That, also for this trip, France approved Israel’s application that its official plane flew its territory on the way to New York, where the prime minister plans to intervene before the UN General Assembly. However, in a context of growing tension with Paris by President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to recognize the Palestinian State last Monday, the Zion wings has avoided, for the first time, the French airspace.
According to website of flight tracers such as the aircraft departed from the Ben Gurion International Airport of Tel Aviv on Thursday morning. He did it without journalists on board, as usual, and the news was known only hours later, when Prime Minister’s press office spread statements and photographs along with his wife Sarah, at the foot of the plane of the plane.
According to the trajectory registered by that website, the plane briefly flew over the airspace of Greece and Italy, before continuing its route through the Mediterranean, avoiding the French and Spanish territories, just before crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and access the central Atlantic. The normal route for displacement between Israel and New York, much shorter and efficient in terms of fuel consumption, crosses France – or Spain and Portugal – before ascending north to Ireland and the United Kingdom. All these countries are signatory of the TPI and should theoretically arrest and deliver to The Netanyahu.
In the previous six trips of this last mandate of the Prime Minister to the United States, the Boeing 767 officer had taken that shortest and most overwhelmed route Greece, Italy and France without complications. The governments of those countries, especially the French, then criticized for breaching article 86 of the Treaty of Rome that forces them to stop Netanyahu. Paris also did not prohibit the entrance of the Israeli plane into its airspace.
“Few things illustrate as much as Netanyahu has taken Israel to diplomatic isolation as the route that his plane (without journalists) is taking this morning towards New York, carefully drawn to avoid flying countries could be arrested by an order of the TPI,” he analyzes in an X the Israeli journalist Antehel Pfeffer, correspondent of The Economist in the Economist in the Middle East.
Netanyahu will visit the White House on this trip and meet next week with the US president Donald Trump.
An independent UN Commission, Human Rights, NGOs and a growing number of countries qualify the Israeli military offensive against the Gaza Strip, in which more than 65,000 people have died.
