COVID-19 pandemic and travel: Israel closes its only international airport

JERUSALEM - Israel will close its only major airport for at least a week, authorities said Sunday, effectively sealing itself off from international travel in a bid to vaccinate more of its population before new variants of the coronavirus take hold here.

The cabinet agreed Sunday to bar incoming and outgoing international passenger flights at Ben Gurion International Airport from midnight Monday until at least the end of January, unless a parliamentary committee votes to overturn the plan.

The few exceptions will include cargo flights, medical evacuations and "firefighting flights," according to the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Departures will be banned except for certain extreme cases, including family funerals and legal proceedings, which will require individual approval by health authorities.

Even Jewish immigrants scheduled to arrive under the country's Right of Return law will be barred during the shutdown, an interruption in the flow of newcomers that reportedly was opposed by the Israel's Immigration minister.

"No nation has done what we are about to do - we are hermetically sealing the country," Netanyahu said in a statement. "We do this to prevent the entry of the virus mutations and to ensure that we progress quickly with our vaccination campaign."

Israel has outpaced all other countries in inoculating about 27 percent of its population with at least the first of the two-dose Pfizer vaccine. Officials expected to vaccinate another million residents over the course of the next week, pushing the program's reach to more than a third of the country.

The country's health system is in a tense race with a rate of covid infections that threatens to overwhelm its hospital capacity. Israelis are mired in their third national lockdown; the number of critical cases, which had drifted downward, showed another increase over the weekend.

Officials have expressed confidence that the massive vaccine effort will begin to tell as more second shots are delivered, but they worry that the new strains of the virus are responsible for the stubborn hospitalisation rate.

A variant of the virus first identified in the United Kingdom, which appears to be significantly more contagious, has been detected in some of Israel's latest positive cases, according to media reports. Coronavirus Czar Nachman Ash has told officials that he expects the British variant to become dominate in Israel within weeks.