Why did Ryanair erase Tel Aviv from its route maps?

Ryanair quietly removed Tel Aviv as a destination from its listed routes, raising questions about whether the low-cost carrier will ever return to Ben Gurion Airport.

By World Israel News staff

Irish low-cost carrier Ryanair has removed Tel Aviv from its route maps, signaling that the airline’s temporary suspension of flights to and from Israel may now be permanent.

In September, Ryanair announced that it was suspending service to the Jewish state until at least summer 2026, while leaving open the possibility that regular flights could eventually resume.

However, the erasure of Tel Aviv as a destination from its route maps — without listing the Mediterranean city as frozen or suspended — suggests that the airline may no longer intend to operate at Ben Gurion Airport.

The move comes amid an increasingly public spat between Ryanair and Israel’s airport authority, with both sides trading blame for the ongoing suspension of flights.

Ryanair has argued that the closure of Terminal 1 at Ben Gurion Airport, which mainly serves low-cost carriers, combined with slot allocation issues, forced it to cancel winter flights on short notice.

Israel’s aviation authority pushed back, accusing the airline of unfairly shifting blame to mask its own mismanagement.

The dispute intensified in May 2025, when Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said the airline was “beginning to lose patience” with “flights to and from Tel Aviv” due to repeated missile attacks targeting Ben Gurion Airport — remarks that implied the carrier was weighing a permanent withdrawal from the Israeli market.

“If they’re going to keep being disrupted by these security disruptions, frankly, we’d be better off sending those aircraft somewhere else in Europe,” O’Leary told analysts during a media conference tied to the release of Ryanair’s annual results.

Notably, O’Leary appeared to place responsibility on Israel for being attacked and did not mention that Yemen-based Houthi terrorists were behind the ballistic missile strikes that repeatedly targeted the airport.

In June 2023, a Ryanair flight attendant repeatedly announced that a flight bound for Ben Gurion Airport was heading to “occupied Palestine.”

At the time, O’Leary insisted he was “100% satisfied that this was an innocent mistake with no political overtones or intent.”