Ben Gurion International Airport (; ) , commonly known by the Hebrew-language acronym (), is the main international airport of Israel and the busiest in the country. It lies on the northern outskirts of Lod, northwest of Jerusalem and southeast of Tel Aviv. Known as Lod Airport until 1973, it was renamed that year in honour of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, following his death. The airport is operated by the Israel Airports Authority and serves as a hub for El Al, Israir, Arkia and Sundor.
The airport was built in 1934 during the British Mandate and served as a Royal Air Force station during the Second World War. Israeli forces captured it in July 1948, during Operation Danny, and it became the country's principal point of arrival for Jewish immigrants, from the airlifts of the early 1950s to Operation Solomon in 1991. In 1972 it was the scene of the hijacking of Sabena Flight 571 and the Lod Airport massacre, in which 26 people were killed; four years later, hostages rescued in Operation Entebbe were flown back to the airport, and in 1977 the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat landed there at the start of the first visit to Israel by an Arab head of state. Terminal 3, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, opened in 2004 and replaced the original Terminal 1, which now handles domestic and low-cost international flights.
Operations at the airport have repeatedly been disrupted by regional conflict. Several foreign airlines suspended flights during the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict and the Gaza war; in May 2025 a Houthi ballistic missile struck inside the airport's perimeter, and the following month it was closed for eleven days during the Twelve-Day War with Iran. The airport was also brought to a near standstill by the COVID-19 pandemic, closing to passenger traffic entirely for several weeks in early 2021.
In 2025 the airport handled 19.2 million passengers, making it one of the busiest airports in the Middle East, and it is regarded as central to Israel's economy, tourism and trade. By the mid-2020s it was operating close to its capacity limits, and the Israel Airports Authority has pursued a long-term expansion programme that has included a runway reconfiguration completed in 2014, a new control tower in 2015, a fourth concourse at Terminal 3 and a planned on-site hotel; Ramon Airport, opened in 2019, was designed partly as an emergency alternative. The airport's security screening relies heavily on passenger profiling, which supporters credit with preventing attacks on departing flights and which Israeli civil-rights organisations have challenged in the Supreme Court as discriminatory towards Arab passengers. A 2007 government review found serious shortcomings in Israeli aviation safety, and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration downgraded Israel's safety rating in 2008 before restoring it in 2012.
History British Mandatory period (1934–1948)
The airport began during the British Mandate for Palestine as an airstrip of two unpaved runways on the outskirts of the town of Lydda (now Lod), near the Templer colony of Wilhelma. It was built in 1934, largely at the urging of Airwork Services. The first passenger service at the new airport was the Misr Airwork route Cairo—Lydda—Nicosia, inaugurated on 3 August 1935. Subsequently, Misr flew via Lydda to Haifa and Baghdad. The first continental European airline with a regular service to Lydda was LOT Polish Airlines since 4 April 1937. Holland's KLM, which had since 1933 stopped at Gaza en route to Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia), moved the service to Lydda in 1937. Imperial Airways, too, used Lydda as a refueling stop en route to India.
During World War II, Imperial Airways and later British Overseas Airways Corporation continued the service to Lydda until the fall of France in June 1940. When the Japanese military advanced into Burma and Malaya in February 1942, KLM curtailed its route to Batavia and made Lydda the eastern terminus of the route. Misr Airwork, which had suspended flights upon the British declaration of war, resumed the weekly Cairo—Lydda—Nicosia service in May 1940.
In 1943, the airport was renamed "RAF Station Lydda" and continued to serve as a major airfield for military air transport and aircraft ferry operations between military bases in Europe, Africa, the Middle East (mainly Iraq and Persia) and South/Southeast Asia. In 1944, as the German threat in the Middle East subsided, Aviron Aviation Company initiated service four times a week between Lydda and Haifa.
On 25 February 1946, Irgun and Lehi fighters carried out a coordinated night raid on RAF Station Lydda and two other Royal Air Force airfields in Palestine, destroying 22 Handley Page Halifax bombers, seven Supermarine Spitfires and four Avro Ansons across the three bases.
Israel 20th century
Soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces captured the airport on 10 July 1948, in Operation Danny, transferring control to the newly declared State of Israel. In 1948 the Israelis changed the official name of the airport from "Lod International Airport" to "Tel Aviv-Lod International Airport". Flights resumed on 24 November 1948. El Al was founded the following year and flew its inaugural service from the airport to Paris via Rome, while Arkia began domestic flights to Eilat and Haifa in 1950. A terminal expansion completed in 1951 raised the airport's capacity to 100,000 passengers a month, as it handled the mass immigration of the period, including airlifts of Jewish communities from Yemen and Iraq.
In the 1960s the airport received its first scheduled jet services, from London and Athens, and El Al launched its first jet route to New York using a leased Boeing 707. Air traffic grew considerably after the Six-Day War in 1967, as many foreign airlines began operating scheduled flights to the airport.
1972 attacks On 8 May 1972, four Black September militants hijacked Sabena Flight 571 en route from Vienna and forced it to land at the airport, demanding the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. After a standoff of some 23 hours, Sayeret Matkal commandos disguised as aircraft technicians stormed the parked airliner in an operation codenamed Isotope, killing the two male hijackers and capturing their two female accomplices; one passenger was fatally wounded and later died. The assault was led by Ehud Barak; Benjamin Netanyahu, who took part as a team leader, was wounded by friendly fire. Both later served as prime minister of Israel.
Later that month, on 30 May 1972, three members of the Japanese Red Army acting on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine arrived at the airport on an Air France flight using forged passports. After clearing immigration they collected their luggage from the baggage carousel, took out automatic rifles and grenades and opened fire in the arrivals hall, killing 26 people and wounding 78 in what became known as the Lod Airport massacre. Seventeen of the dead were Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico and one was Canadian; of the eight Israelis killed, the best known was the biophysicist Aharon Katzir, then president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Two of the attackers, Tsuyoshi Okudaira and Yasuyuki Yasuda, died during the attack.
The only attacker who survived, Kozo Okamoto, was wounded and captured. He received a life sentence but was released in 1985 as part of a prisoner exchange with the PFLP-GC, in what became known as the Jibril Agreement.
1973–1980
The airport's name was changed from Lod to Ben Gurion International Airport in 1973 to honour Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who died that year.
During the Yom Kippur War, the airport was the main Israeli terminus for Operation Nickel Grass, a large-scale United States airlift of military equipment that began in October 1973. The first C-5 Galaxy transport touched down on 14 October, and by the time the airlift wound down a month later, American aircraft had flown 567 missions to Israel, delivering more than 22,000 tons of tanks, artillery, combat aircraft and other matériel.
On 27 June 1976, Air France Flight 139, which had departed the airport for Paris, was hijacked and diverted to Entebbe in Uganda. After Israeli commandos freed the hostages in Operation Entebbe on 4 July, the rescued passengers were flown back to the airport, where Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Defence Minister Shimon Peres met them and the soldiers on the tarmac.
On the evening of 19 November 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat landed at the airport at the start of the first visit to Israel by an Arab head of state. He was received with a formal ceremony, including a 21-gun salute, and was greeted by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, President Ephraim Katzir and former prime minister Golda Meir. In 1980, following the Egypt–Israel peace treaty, a flight from Cairo landed at the airport for the first time in almost forty years.
1980s–1990s More buildings and runways were added over the years, but with the onset of mass immigration from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union in the 1980s and 90s, as well as the global increase of international business travel, the existing facilities became inadequate, prompting the design of a new terminal that could also accommodate the expected tourism influx for the 2000 millennium celebrations. The decision to go ahead with the project was reached in January 1994.
Gateway for immigration Beyond its commercial role, the airport has been the principal point of arrival for Jewish immigration to Israel. In its first years it received the airlifts that brought Jewish communities from Yemen and Iraq, traffic that contributed to the terminal expansion completed in 1951. The best known of the later operations was Operation Solomon, in which more than 14,300 Ethiopian Jews were flown from Addis Ababa to the airport over some 36 hours on 24 and 25 May 1991, mostly aboard Boeing 747s; one aircraft is reported to have carried about 1,000 passengers, a record for a single flight.
21st century During the 2014 conflict with Gaza, several airlines banned their flights to the airport for a couple of days.
Ramon Airport, near Eilat, opened in January 2019, partly to serve as an emergency alternative able to accommodate Israel's entire passenger fleet if Ben Gurion cannot operate during a conflict.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought the airport's operations to a near-standstill. El Al suspended nearly all scheduled passenger flights on 27 March 2020, and Terminal 1 closed entirely for lack of traffic, leaving Terminal 3 operating at a fraction of its normal capacity. The airport was closed to passenger traffic entirely between 26 January and 6 March 2021, during Israel's third nationwide lockdown. Annual passenger numbers fell by 80.6 percent in 2020 compared with the previous year, and recovered only partially thereafter: the 21.9 million passengers handled in 2023 remained below the 24.8 million recorded in 2019.
In October 2023, with the outbreak of the Gaza war, the number of airlines that flew into the airport dropped to just 7. By February 2024, only 45 airlines flew into the airport.
On 4 May 2025, the Houthis launched a ballistic missile which landed within the perimeter of the airport, injuring six people. Magen David Adom said that two others were treated for acute anxiety. A month later, the airport was shut down for eleven days (13–24 June) as Israel closed its skies for civil aviation due to the Twelve-Day War.
On 18 March 2026, during the 2026 Iran War, a missile strike damaged three empty private planes parked at the airport, leading Israeli authorities to reduce to 130 the maximum number of passengers permitted on outbound flights.