Ben Gurion Airport among most disrupted in the world, day after wildcat labor strike
Times of Israel · LC · trust 38/100
Ben Gurion Airport was the most disrupted airport in the world for departures on Friday morning, with delays averaging between 70 and 90 minutes, almost 24 hours after a wildcat labor strike drove a wave of cancellations.
Overall, when taking into account both departures and arrivals, the airport was the 10th most disrupted airport globally, data from Flightradar24 showed.
The airport was expected to return to normal operations over the weekend, though employees had fully returned to work by mid-afternoon on Thursday.
The “surprise strike,” which the Histadrut labor union denied having called, came as a result of workers’ complaints relating to insufficient personnel to handle the influx of passengers during the August vacation rush. Staff left check-in counters unmanned and incoming flights were halted, causing massive delays.
The Finance Ministry estimated the cost of the strike at some NIS 30 million ($10 million), according to Hebrew media reports.
Yiftach Ron Tal, head of the Airports Authority, told the Ynet news site on Thursday: “I’m glad to say, the airport is returning to full operations, and even beyond that. We’re ramping up the number of departing flights, and will be doubling them in the coming hours.”
“I’m very hopeful that by morning, we’ll have reached a point where the airport is functioning normally,” he said.
One Israeli airline, which remained unnamed, told Kan late Thursday it expected operations at the airport would take about 24 hours to return to normal.
Thursday had been expected to be the busiest travel day of the past 12 months, with some 107,000 passengers set to flow through the airport, and more than 600 scheduled takeoffs and landings.
In the wake of the wildcat strike, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party stripped the airport’s workers’ union chief, Pinchas Idan, of his party membership.
Sources in Likud, speaking to the Ynet news site, alleged that the strike was an effort to harm the prime minister and Transportation Minister Miri Regev, both of whom toured the airport on Wednesday and heaped praise on its workers.
“No labor dispute was declared,” said a senior party official. “There were no threats, preliminary steps, that would have given early indication of a dramatic strike like this.”
“So what happened, after all? A clear attempt to harm Regev, and — indirectly — also Netanyahu,” the source said.
Channel 12 reported on Thursday that in fact, the strike was originally planned for Wednesday, but was delayed due to the officials’ visit. After the visit, Regev flew to Morocco for a “private” seven-day trip with top officials in her ministry.
Watch Minister of Transportation Regev handing out compliments to Airport Authority employees yesterday, just before flying to Morocco for vacation As a thank you they respond by bringing the airport to a complete standstill pic.twitter.com/gAG1pBjHm5
— #EBluemountain1 ???????? (@EBluemountain1) August 20, 2026
Idan blamed chronic worker shortages for the strike, and said he’d written to Regev in June, telling her “the root of the problem is a severe manpower shortage,” noting that the Airports Authority had decided to lay off 250 temporary workers, despite the shifts being overwhelmed even when fully staffed. Keren Turner, former director-general of both the Transportation Ministry and the Finance Ministry and a candidate on the Together party slate in the upcoming national elections, wrote on X Thursday: “Usually, the Israeli public doesn’t realize how much it’s being harmed by poor public services. Today, it’s getting an example of that.”
“To everyone currently stuck at Ben Gurion, or in a traffic jam, or waiting hours for a bus that hasn’t come – it’s important to me that you know the situation doesn’t have to be this way. They’ve gotten us accustomed to a government that normalizes the idea that it can’t solve anything, but soon things will be different,” she wrote.
Together leader Naftali Bennett joined Turner at the airport, telling media: “Ben Gurion is in chaos because of a government of chaos. What you see here — these very difficult images — they’re not the result of a natural disaster, they’re the result of a government that is a disaster.”
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