It was 7am on June 2, 1996, in Cairo when Captain Zeyad al-Bada received a surprising phone call from Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat.
Arafat told al-Bada, then a 39-year-old Palestinian Airlines captain and Arafat’s personal pilot, that he would be the first to land at the newly built Gaza International Airport.
“There were no aerial maps, no radars, the Gaza airport wasn’t even globally recognised,” al-Bada, now the airline’s general director, told Al Jazeera.
Cairo International Airport refused to create a flight plan to Gaza until Arafat asked then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to intervene and order the Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority to issue one.