Emergency flight to bring Israelis home from Argentina needs more passengers

Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires looking for minimum 60 people to sign up so flight can go ahead; ‘We don’t know when there will be new flights again,’ says ambassador

By JTA 7 April 2020, 5:00 am

Edit

A passenger sleeps at Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Monday, March 23, 2020. Many Argentines who returned from overseas struggle to get to their local destination amid travel restrictions put in place to help stop the spread of the new coronavirus. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano)

BUENOS AIRES — The Israeli embassy in Argentina is trying to find enough passengers for a flight that with 60 passengers would bring Israelis currently stranded in the country back home on Saturday.

The problem: The flight does not have 60 passengers yet, and registration for the Ethiopian Airlines flight ends on Wednesday.

“We are calling to all the Israelis that are in Argentina to get registered now, because we don’t know when there will be new flights again, and there at the moment there does not appear to be an El Al rescue flight,” Israel’s ambassador to Argentina Galit Ronen told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The flight would go from Buenos Aires to Brazil to Ethiopia to Israel and costs $1875 per person. Israelis in Argentina are urged to email Ethiopian.argentina@aviareps.com with the subject line “Repatriation to TLV.”

Argentina is under a “preventive and compulsory” lockdown due to the coronavirus since March 20 that will continue at least until at least April 12. There is some speculation the lockdown could be relaxed that day, but there is no word on whether air travel out of the country would resume.