A little-known airline has linked Cairo and Tel Aviv for decades
I've actually flown Air Sinai once!  And not from Cairo to Tel Aviv, but to Yasser Arafat International aka Gaza Airport (GZA).<p>The plane was a standard 737, but completely unmarked, sitting in a remote bus bay far from the terminal.  Load was abysmal, maybe 20 or so people.  Service was the usual surly Egyptair (aka "Misery Air", <i>Misr</i> being the Arabic name for Egypt) experience, but it was a short flight of only an hour or so.<p>On arrival at GZA, we were driven over to the nearby Rafah border, herded into a holding area, instructed to identify and open our luggage, and then moved to a different room to be frisked and interrogated by Israeli security while another set of guards pawed through the bags, sight unseen.  All staff involved were very much not in a hurry, and all in all, it took about four hours (!) for the 20 of us to go from wheels on the ground to getting into the airport terminal, through Palestinian immigration and then Gaza proper.  And I didn't even get a passport stamp.  (I did get one from the Erez border when crossing by land into Israel proper later, which raised some eyebrows later when leaving Israel...)<p>At the time, the airport served around 2 flights per day (Cairo and Amman, Jordan, IIRC), but the departures board optimistically listed a whole slew of fantasy flights from all over the Arab world and Europe (Milan! Istanbul!).  I remember seeing a school group on a tour through this airport and thinking that odds are very high that all these kids here will live their lives without ever leaving this 40x6 km slice of land (large chunks of which are off-limits buffer areas), packed with 2 million Palestinians living cheek to jowl.<p>Shortly thereafter in 2000, the al-Aqsa Intifada started and the airport was bombed by Israeli fighters.  It's been in ruins ever since.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat_International_Airport" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Arafat_International_Ai...</a>