History
The airport was built with funding from Japan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and Germany and designed by Moroccan architects (modeled after Casablanca airport) and engineers funded by Morocco's King Hassan II. The total cost was $86 million. After a year of construction, it opened on 24 November 1998; attendees at the opening ceremony included Yasser Arafat and US President Bill Clinton. At the time, the opening of the airport was described as evidence of progress toward Palestinian statehood. The airport was twinned with Mohammed V International Airport, in Casablanca, Morocco.
The radar station and control tower were destroyed by Israel Defense Forces aircraft in 2001 after the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada, and bulldozers cut the runway apart in January 2002. From 2001 to 2006, airport staff still manned the ticket counters and baggage areas, although no aircraft flew into or out of the airport during that period. The closest public airport in the area is El Arish International Airport in Egypt. The only remaining runway in Gaza after 2002 is that of the Gaza Airstrip. After the destruction of Gaza airport by Israeli army, the International Civil Aviation Organization ICAO condemned Israel for the destruction of a civilian airport and navigational devices used for civilian purposes only. Israel's justification was that they might be attacked from this airport as it was the best equipped in Gaza.
Read more about this topic: Yasser Arafat International Airport
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)