Germans are stuck in Israel
Lufthansa hotline for special flights is overloaded
October 12, 2023, 11:49 a.m
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Lufthansa wants to fly stranded Germans home from Israel. Four flights are planned for each of the next two days. The problem: According to a report, the hotline set up by the airline cannot be reached.
According to a media report, there were problems when booking the planned special flights for the Germans stranded in Israel. Several German citizens reported on Wednesday that the hotline set up by Lufthansa could not be reached despite more than a hundred calls, reported the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. There is also no waiting loop, just a busy signal. There were also corresponding complaints in online networks. The airline is working hard on a solution, the “SZ” report said, citing the Foreign Office.
After the major attack on Israel by the radical Islamic Hamas, Lufthansa wants to bring Germans stranded in the country back home on special flights starting today. Four flights are planned from Tel Aviv starting today, Thursday and Friday, and are expected back in Germany in the afternoon. Lufthansa had suspended its regular Israel flights until Saturday due to the situation in the Middle East.
The airline is now checking whether scheduled flights will be possible again from Sunday due to the situation. A spokesman for the Foreign Office said on Wednesday that around 5,000 people had been registered on the crisis list of the German embassy in Israel. But he couldn’t say whether all these people wanted to leave. According to the German ambassador to Israel, Steffen Seibert, around a hundred Germans were able to travel overland to Jordan on Wednesday. They were taken by bus from Tel Aviv to Amman, Seibert wrote on the online service X, formerly Twitter.
The radical Islamic group Hamas launched a major attack against Israel on Saturday. It fired thousands of rockets at Israel and invaded the country with hundreds of fighters. According to the latest information, the attackers killed more than 1,200 people and took around 150 hostages. The Israeli army subsequently put the Gaza Strip under constant fire. According to local authorities, 1,200 people were also killed in the Palestinian territory.
Immediately after the start of the Hamas attack, the first countries launched repatriation operations for stranded citizens. On Monday, three military planes carrying Polish citizens evacuated from Israel landed in Warsaw. Several other EU countries also organized special flights and brought hundreds of people back to their home countries. The Austrian government said it evacuated 98 people from Tel Aviv on Wednesday evening. In addition to 83 Austrians, there were also nationals of other countries on board the plane, including Germans.