The arrivals hall at Beirut airport. (Credit: Mohammad Yassin/L'Orient-Le Jour)
The German airline Lufthansa had repeatedly extended the suspension of its flights to Beirut. But since Sunday, the Lebanese capital has once again been connected by the group's flights to Frankfurt, Germany.
According to the online flight tracking platform planefinder, a first flight, an Airbus A321 from Frankfurt, landed on Sunday shortly after 4 p.m. on the tarmac of Beirut airport, with a few minutes of delay, and departed back to Germany at 5:30 p.m. This shuttle is now scheduled daily, according to this platform and the Beirut airport website.
No official communication was made by the group about this resumption.
Travel agencies confirmed to L'Orient-Le Jour that Beirut-Frankfurt flights were currently scheduled at the rate of one round trip per day, and that this would “soon” be increased to two. Swiss Air will resume its Zurich-Beirut routes on June 10, with two or three flights a week.
The Lufthansa group was one of the airlines that suspended its flights to and from Beirut and was the earliest and for the longest time since the start of the war between Hezbollah and Israel on Oct. 8, 2023, following the war in Gaza. Although the fragile cease-fire reached on Nov. 27 ended more than 13 months of war between the two sides, several companies still have not resumed their flights, like Swiss Air.
Eurowings, one of Lufthansa's group airlines, resumed its flights to Beirut on March 17. The group – which also includes the airlines Swiss, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, and now ITA Airlines – was one of the first to suspend its flights at the beginning of the Gaza war in 2023, before reinstating them and suspending them again last July due to initial signs of escalating tensions between Israel and Hezbollah.
The Lufthansa group announced on May 26 an extension of the suspension of its connections with Tel-Aviv until June 15, following Israel's intensified offensive in the Gaza Strip.
Between late September and early December, at the height of the war, the national company Middle East Airlines (MEA) was the only one to continue regular flights to Beirut. Since the cease-fire, many foreign airlines have resumed their service to the Lebanese capital.
