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SWISS cancels evacuation flights from Israel for security reasons

people arrive in Switzerland, greeted by flowers
SWISS has already flown more than 200 people from Israel back to Switzerland. © Keystone / Ennio Leanza

After a final flight on Friday, SWISS airline is temporarily no longer bringing Swiss citizens back home from Israel on special flights. It has cancelled two evacuation flights planned for Saturday at short notice.

The reason for the decision is security concerns. The Israeli government’s ultimatum to Hamas will end on Saturday morning, the airline said on Friday afternoon. From then on, a ground offensive by Israel in the Gaza Strip and a further escalation of violence could be expected. It was therefore not justifiable to operate the flights for the time being.

The decision does not affect the fourth special flight, which is scheduled to land in Zurich on Friday evening.

SWISS already flew more than 200 people back to Switzerland on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here. 

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