As Israel plans two new airports, experts say proposed site near Gaza won’t fly |
For more than two decades, Israel has framed the construction of a second international airport near the country’s main population centers as a pressing national need to ease growing air traffic congestion.
Yet successive Israeli governments, mostly at the helm of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have failed to move forward with implementing decisions and development plans for a major air hub outside of Ben Gurion International Airport, aside from the remote Ramon Airport near Eilat.
The latest plan now being advanced by the government involves not one but two new international airports simultaneously: One in the north, at the current site of the Ramat David air force base in the Jezreel Valley, not far from Haifa, and one to the south, in the northern reaches of the Negev desert between Beersheba and the border with Gaza at a site called Ziklag.
The double whammy is meant to build capacity and then some for what officials hope will be a sustained resurgence of tourism in the coming decades. Passenger numbers were at record levels before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down air travel and had been on the rebound when the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and ensuing war brought tourism to a virtual halt.
But though experts agree Israel must build more capacity for air travel, some question the viability or sense of putting an airport in the northern Negev along with one over a former airbase in the Lower Galilee, citing concerns about security, a lack of infrastructure and existing air traffic congestion in the area, and seeing the decision as driven more by politics than sound reasoning.
“Israel has not been able to build even one new international airport after 20 years of discussion and a handful of governmental decisions on where it would be located, so how can we realistically speak about two?” said Brig. Gen. (res.) Joel Feldschuh, a former head of the Civil Aviation Authority.
Feldschuh, a military and civil aviation expert who also served as the CEO of Israel’s flagship carrier El Al, championed the establishment of an international airport at Ramat David during his tenure at the helm of the Civil Aviation Authority from 2014 to 2022.
Technically, Israel already has three international airports. Ramon airport, located in the sparsely populated Negev desert near the Red Sea resort city in Eilat, has the capacity to handle millions of passengers a year and a runway that can handle large jumbo jets. There is also a small airport in Haifa served by Air Haifa, which runs daily flights to and from Cyprus and Greece.
In practice, however, nearly all international travel into and out of Israel is handled by Ben Gurion International Airport, which sits some 8 kilometers (5 miles) southeast of Tel Aviv.
In 2019, the airport handled over 24 million international passengers and nearly 800,000 more on domestic flights, stretching capacity on especially busy days. More than 167,000 passenger planes landed at or took off from the airport over that year, plus around 4,300 more cargo planes, averaging out to around 470 flights a day, or one every three minutes.
According to Feldschuh, during the peak summer months that year, the Israel Airport Authority “denied about five to 10 percent of the traffic demand as it couldn’t absorb it because of the aerial infrastructure.”
Should geopolitical calm prevail and tourism indeed come back, the airport is expected to see as many as 40 million passengers annually within the next five years, hitting its current peak capacity, and as many as 80 million by 2050, according to some forecasts.
Simply expanding Ben Gurion is not an option, as capacity is not limited by the airport’s infrastructure but rather by security-related constraints on air traffic lanes, according to Nicole Adler, a professor of Operations Research at the Hebrew University Business School in Jerusalem.
“When we are told that Ben Gurion can’t carry more than 40 million people, that’s just not true, that’s a pretend number,” said Adler. “The capacity issue is not an infrastructure issue of Ben Gurion Airport but because of massive restrictions on the airspace for civilians’ use due to security.”
“The civilian air traffic control system in Israel is like a handkerchief around Ben Gurion Airport and out to the sea as most of the airspace is blocked off,” she added.
Vowing to provide a “real response” to the airport capacity issue, Netanyahu, Transportation Minister Miri Regev and Deputy Minister Almog Cohen announced plans earlier this month for the simultaneous construction of two international airports.
The government decision nodded to a previous resolution to use Ramat David for one new airport, while declaring that a second one would be developed at Ziklag, a swath of open land between the cities of Rahat and Netivot in the northern Negev.
Ramat David would be slated to be able to handle 33 million passengers a year, while Ziklag, about a 30-minute drive from Beersheba in one direction and from the Gaza border in the other, would have capacity for 10 million, according to Calcalist.
The idea for an airport in the south was strongly pushed by Regev and Cohen, a resident of the southern town of Ofakim who has long pulled for the construction of an airport to serve the northern Negev.
Cohen had earlier threatened to resign from the government after a proposal for an airport adjacent to the Nevatim air force base outside Beersheba — an idea panned by experts — was rejected over security concerns.
Netanyahu and supporters of the Ziklag site say it will help develop the Negev, bringing jobs to a part of the country that has long been an economic backwater but which is slated to see strong growth in the coming years as the government pumps billions into strengthening and redeveloping the region following the devastating October 7 attacks.
Aside from Beersheba, the airport would serve burgeoning tech hub Kiryat Gat, Sderot, Ofakim, Rahat and could help buoy a US-administered AI tech park tentatively planned in the area.
But there are also deep concerns over the location’s suitability and security concerns given its proximity to the restive Gaza border.
In the past, the idea of an airport in such proximity to Hamas rockets would have made the Ziklag site a non-starter, but Feldschuh, a fighter pilot and former head of the Israel Air Force’s Intelligence Division, noted that the missile threat was no longer unique to the Gaza border region.
“It appears that since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Gaza border communities, there is a change in the perception of security risk in the sense that proximity to the border is no longer a disqualifying factor as many areas across the country were targeted during the last war,” he said.
The proximity to Gaza, however, will force air traffic approaching or leaving Ziklag to squeeze into tight airspace already jammed by military flight paths and planes flying into or out of Ben Gurion.
“The main problem is aerial infrastructure within the center of Israel, the greatest limitation in Israel, which is already a bottleneck for air traffic, not the terminals,” said Feldschuh. “The location that was chosen, is very congested already, so it wouldn’t help if they will build it.”
Adler, who consults for global transport and civil aviation authorities, including in Israel, noted that the Ziklag location is a greenfield development, meaning it is in an area with no existing infrastructure needed for a major project, such as fuel lines, electricity, water, sewage, or connections to the rest of the country via highway or rail.
Route 6, the Cross-Israel Highway, passes some 10 kilometers (six miles) north of Ziklag, while the train line connecting Beersheba to Netivot and Tel Aviv passes some seven kilometers (4.5 miles) to the south.
“There has to be good ground access for this new competitive airport to succeed, and because our roads are completely clogged, it has to be public transport, which is expensive to build and that’s on the Israeli taxpayer,” said Adler. “So if there was good access to the Ziglak site and there were good, reliable train services every five minutes and people in Tel Aviv could use it like just as easily as they could use Ben Gurion – this is a lot of ifs and buts.”
“So connectivity and access to rail, roads and bus services will be key because people are not going to come here and stay in Rahat or Netivot – this is not where they are going to spend their holidays – we have to be realistic, meaning that if the economics do not make sense, tourists will not come,” Adler cautioned.
Both new airports were described in the government decision as “complementary” to Ben Gurion, rather than competitive, meaning they won’t be able to draw traffic and serve the public by undercutting Ben Gurion on fees and services.
Adler described the decision as one driven by the “political necessity” of keeping labor unions at Ben Gurion happy.
“Israel does not need any complementary airports, it needs competition in order to reduce ridiculous prices and therefore private companies are the ones that should be building, managing and operating the new airport instead of the government setting prices for fees so it will be economically viable,” she said.
Despite the drawbacks, the Transportation Ministry is pushing ahead with the plan and has already started issuing tenders for the project. Announcing the decision at a cabinet meeting on February 15, Netanyahu urged that planning for Ziklag and related infrastructure get pushed ahead to catch up with the Ramat David project, which is further along in the planning stage.
Despite already having much of the necessary infrastructure, Ramat David in the Jezreel Valley is still expected to take five to 10 years to develop; experts predict it will be far longer than a decade before Ziklag is ready.
“This is a waste of money,” said Feldschuh of the southern airport. “Our government is very good at making a declaration, but nothing stands behind it — it will become another white elephant, like the Ramon Airport.”
Opened in 2019 to boost tourism to Eilat, which is some three hours by car from the country’s main population centers, Ramon Airport has largely failed to attract foreign airlines, leaving it an expensive desert boondoggle. The airport, located about a half-hour drive north of Eilat, is almost exclusively used for domestic flights coming from Ben Gurion and occasional flights from Haifa, though it has also come in handy as an exit point for Gazans approved to seek medical treatment abroad.
The Ramat David airport plan, in the works since 2014, has also faced pushback, though primarily from locals concerned about ecological damage, traffic congestion and air pollution. A feasibility study found it to be a viable site from economic and aviation points of view.
“People living in Jezreel Valley keep fighting it, it’s called NIMBY,” said Adler, using the acronym for Not In My BackYard. “They want access to the airport, but don’t want to have to deal with the noise and environmental impact.”
The site, between Yokneam and Nazareth, about a half-hour drive from Haifa, already has two runways and existing connections to major highways, including Route 6, and a rail line.
“The Ramat David site makes the most sense, also because it has the largest, what’s called catchment area, as there are more people living in the north, and for them to get to Ben Gurion Airport takes a very long time,” said Adler. “The airport would provide public transport, access and trains and would be open to around 3 million people [living in the north].”
Among its opponents is Jezreel Valley Regional Council head Shlomit Shichor Reichman.
“Establishing an international airfield in the heart of the rural area will harm Israel’s food security, agriculture, the environment and the public health of us all,” he said, promising to fight it with all legal and public tools.
But Feldschuh maintained that solutions could be found for environmental concerns, reducing pollution to even lower than Ramat David’s current impact.
“In my view as an aviation professional, there is no other place in Israel than Ramat David which is suitable for establishing another international airport,” he said. “Now it waits for politicians who can make constructive decisions.”
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