The labor strike that led to chaos at Ben-Gurion Airport today (Thursday) were originally intended to take place a day earlier, with the aim of disrupting Transportation Minister Miri Regev’s flight, senior Israel Airports Authority officials revealed in a conversation with Channel 12 News.
According to the officials, workers’ committee chairman Pinchas Idan decided not to disrupt the minister’s flight to Rabat, the capital of Morocco, at the originally planned time because of the joint tour she conducted at Ben-Gurion Airport alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Idan believed that embarrassing the Prime Minister under those circumstances would be going too far. Nevertheless, according to the same senior officials, instructions were given to interfere with the handling of luggage on the minister’s flight. In practice, there was only a slight delay, and the flight departed as scheduled.
The events at the airport prompted members of the board of directors to request that decisions made over the past three months be reopened for discussion.
Among those decisions was the exceptional extension for an additional year of the terms of workers’ committee chairman Pinchas Idan and his brother Mordechai, even though both had already reached retirement age.
Israel Airports Authority workers’ committee chairman Pinchas Idan responded to the allegations: “Those senior officials would be better off addressing the manpower shortage instead of making assumptions. It never happened."