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Israel’s Israir Airlines has announced that it will launch direct flights from Tel Aviv to Morocco’s Marrakech in July.
The Israeli airline will begin operating it’s nine-hour flights on July 19.
The company said it will have flights operating between the two destinations five times a week.
“We estimate that the demand will be high and hundreds of thousands of passengers from Israel will visit the destination as part of vacation packages or as part of the organised trips,” said Israir’s vice president of marketing, Gil Stav.
The flight is part of the US-moderated agreement Israel signed with Morocco in December 2020,following Morocco’s decision to re-establish ties with Israel.
Under the accord, the two countries agreed to launch direct flights to serve a growing number of both Moroccan and Jewish tourists.
In March, Morocco’s Minister of Tourism Nadia Fettah Alaoui said Rabat and Tel Aviv have both shown “great enthusiasm” to establish direct flights.
She said with the agreement to establish relations and the flights more specifically, the number of Israeli visitors to Morocco will grow from 45,000 per year to 200,000.
Morocco has long been home to Jewishness, with the kingdom’s first encounter with large Jewish populations dating back to years before the emergence of the Roman Empire. After the Spanish edict of expulsion in 1492, some 20,000 Jews also emigrated from Granada to Morocco, fleeing the torture, persecution and forced conversion of the Spanish Inquisition.
At their peak before Israel became a state in 1948, Jews in Morocco numbered over 200,000.
Between Israel’s founding and Morocco’s independence in 1956, most of Morocco’s Jews emigrated to Israel, Canada, and France.
Only a few thousands of Jewish people remain in Morocco, notably in walled cities across Morocco called “mellah.”
