“Polish planes already picked up the first passengers from Israel on Sunday evening who were reporting for return; we will not leave our citizens, we are always with them”, said Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Monday 9 October.

Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau reported on Monday that around a thousand Polish citizens would be seeking to get out of Israel. He announced that the evacuation would take a two-pronged approach. In addition to flights from Tel Aviv to Warsaw, three planes will take Polish citizens from Tel Aviv to Chania in Crete and from there to Poland. Minister of National Defence Mariusz Blaszczak announced that military aircraft crews are also carrying out the flights to Crete.

During the night from Sunday to Monday, more than 250 people were successfully evacuated from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport to Warsaw by a Boeing 737 and two C130 Hercules aircraft.

As the head of Polish diplomacy Zbigniew Rau reported on Polish Radio 24, 600 Polish citizens had been evacuated from Israel by the morning hours of Tuesday 10 October.

It will be recalled that on Saturday morning, 7 October, an attack was launched on Israel by the Muslim Hamas, which infiltrated towns in the south of the country near the Gaza Strip. Israeli towns were also attacked with more than 2,000 rockets. The attacks resulted in the deaths of many foreigners, including 11 US citizens, 18 Thai, several Argentine citizens. The Thai government is to carry out an evacuation, with some 3,000 Thai nationals who are in Israel volunteering to do so. More than 600 Argentineans are also appealing to their government to evacuate.

The death toll from the Hamas attack has risen to 900 Israelis, with at least 2,600 injured and dozens taken prisoner. At least 687 Palestinians have already been killed and 3726 wounded in Israeli air strikes.

Adrian Andrzejewski