Live Update 
From the Liveblog of
Saturday, August 22, 2026
From the Liveblog of
Saturday, August 22, 2026
Chaos from Ben Gurion strike subsides, with flight tracker showing average delay down to 38 minutes
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Passengers and a pet wait at Ben Gurion International Airport during a strike, August 20, 2026. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
The chaos at Ben Gurion Airport appears to have subsided, two days after workers staged a wildcat strike that wreaked havoc on tens of thousands of people’s flights at the height of the travel season and briefly turned Ben Gurion into the most disrupted airport in the world.
The Flightradar24 tracking site says Ben Gurion is experiencing “minor problems with some delays,” with flights delayed by 38 minutes on average — down from 70 to 90 minutes on Friday morning.
Roughly 50,000 people were expected to use the airport today — about half the number of passengers on the day of the strike.
Saturdays generally see lower passenger volume at Ben Gurion because observant Jews don’t travel on Shabbat.
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