Algeria, Tunisia reportedly block out Israeli plane from airspace

Pan-Arab news and commentary website al-Masdar News cited Tunisia’s Nessma TV as reporting the episode on Wednesday.

The television said after facing the prohibition, the aircraft that had also been boarded by some American officials, including US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top advisor Jared Kushner, was forced to take “a northern route that passes through the Mediterranean Sea.”

The alternative route, it added, took the plane all the way through the Greek, Italian, and Spanish airspaces before it could land in Rabat.

Algeria’s An-Nahar website also stiffly rejected allegations that the country had let the plane into its skies. “Spiteful and misleading parties spread false news about the passage of the Zionist plane through Algerian airspace,” it wrote.

Morocco has been the latest country to fall into line with a few-months-old United States-enabled trend of détente with the Israeli regime. The normalization bandwagon has, since September, seen the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan agreeing on rapprochement with Tel Aviv.

The flurry of compromise with the illegal regime has, however, been vehemently denounced by Palestinians and their supporters, who call it a stab in the back of the oppressed nation and its cause of liberation from Israeli occupation and aggression.

The Tunisian Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, confirmed in a statement that all “rumors circulating about Tunisia’s intention to normalize relations with Israel are unfounded,” noting that this position “will not be affected by the international changes.”