Panama Aviation Hub Lacks Direct Israel Route

Panama's Tocumen International Airport handles more than 20 million passengers a year through Copa Airlines' Hub of the Americas, connecting 88 destinations across 32 countries, yet no airline currently flies a direct route between Panama City and Tel Aviv. That gap persists even as El Al, Israel's flag carrier, actively expands into Latin America for the first time in 15 years and Copa sits inside the same global airline alliance that includes El Al as a partner.

How large has Panama's aviation hub become?

Copa Airlines operates up to 420 daily flights to 89 destinations across 32 countries through its Hub of the Americas at Tocumen International Airport, according to Travel and Tour World's 2026 coverage of the airline's network expansion. The carrier expects to carry approximately 21 million passengers in 2026, a figure Copa's own general manager at Tocumen, Jose Ruiz Blanco, said reflects the airport handling more than 20 million connecting passengers annually.

On April 30, 2026, Copa signed a landmark agreement for up to 60 Boeing 737 MAX aircraft valued at $13.5 billion, an acquisition designed to raise the airline's annual passenger throughput from 21 million to more than 27 million by the end of the decade, according to Travel and Tour World's coverage of the deal. Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino personally participated in the signing ceremony, a level of government involvement that Travel and Tour World described as recognition of the acquisition's strategic importance to the country's international connectivity.

Tocumen International Airport is separately investing $40 million in a Terminal 2 expansion designed to improve operational efficiency, running parallel to Copa's fleet growth, according to the same report. Copa has been named Latin America's most on-time airline for 11 consecutive years, according to Cirium data cited by Business Traveller, a reliability record that reinforces the hub's role as the region's primary connecting point between North, Central, and South America.

What is Copa's Panama Stopover program?

Copa Airlines extended its Panama Stopover program from a 7-day to a 15-day transit allowance in 2026, letting international passengers connecting through Tocumen explore Panama without additional airfare costs, according to Travel and Tour World. The airline and Panama's tourism partners aim to welcome more than 250,000 stopover visitors in 2026, up from 215,000 the previous year, according to Business Traveller's reporting on the program's expansion.

The extended stopover window is specifically designed to move visitors beyond Panama City into the country's interior, including the coffee-growing highlands of Chiriqui and the archipelagos along both coasts, according to Travel and Tour World's coverage of the policy change. That routing strategy directly overlaps with Panama's luxury Geisha coffee export economy, a connection documented in The Olam's report on Panama's coffee economy and Israeli water tech.

Why doesn't a direct Israel-Panama flight exist yet?

Panama's ambassador to Israel, Ezra Cohen, has publicly identified the lack of a direct flight as an unresolved gap in the bilateral relationship, telling the Jerusalem Post in 2026 that he hopes to change a routing that currently requires a roughly 13-hour flight with stopovers. Israeli President Isaac Herzog's office separately described Panama as holding tremendous tourism potential for Israeli visitors during Herzog's historic May 2026 visit, a trip documented in The Olam's Panama-Israel canal gateway report.

El Al currently operates no route to Panama or anywhere else in Central America, based on the airline's confirmed 2026 network additions, which include Boston, London Luton, and destinations across Poland, France, Bulgaria, and Greece, according to MICE Travel Advisor's coverage of the carrier's spring 2026 schedule. The airline's most relevant recent expansion into the broader region is a new nonstop route between Tel Aviv and Buenos Aires launching in November 2026, El Al's first return to South America in 15 years, according to Aviation Week.

That Buenos Aires route will become the longest in El Al's network at roughly 16.5 hours westbound, using Boeing 787 aircraft, with flight paths constrained by the airline's need to avoid certain airspace across parts of Africa and the Middle East, per Aviation Week. El Al plans to grow its 787 fleet from 17 aircraft to as many as 28 by the end of the decade, additional widebody capacity that Aviation Week reported is expected to support further long-haul expansion beyond Buenos Aires.

Does alliance infrastructure already link Panama and Israel?

Copa Airlines is a full member of Star Alliance, the global airline network spanning 26 member carriers across more than 195 countries, according to aviation industry directory iFLY. El Al Israel Airlines, while not a full Star Alliance member itself, appears on Star Alliance's own codeshare partner listings alongside members including Turkish Airlines, Lufthansa, and Swiss International Air Lines, according to Star Alliance's published codeshare information.

That structure means the technical alliance infrastructure connecting Panama's Tocumen hub to Tel Aviv already exists on paper, through codeshare agreements and interline ticketing, even without a single carrier operating the route directly. Copa has previously used exactly this kind of codeshare mechanism to extend its reach without adding aircraft, including a 2018 codeshare agreement with fellow Star Alliance member Turkish Airlines that placed Turkish's code on Copa-operated flights across multiple Latin American markets, according to a PR Newswire release announcing the partnership.

What security concerns have shaped Israel-Panama aviation and travel?

Panama's aviation and security relationship with Israel carries a documented history beyond simple route economics. In January 2017, two alleged Hezbollah activists were arrested in Panama on suspicion of planning an attack against the Israeli embassy in Panama City, according to Wikipedia's account of Israel-Panama relations. That arrest followed the earlier 1994 bombing of Alas Chiricanas Flight 901, which killed 21 people including 12 members of Panama's Jewish community, an attack documented further in The Olam's Panama-Israel canal gateway report.

Those security considerations sit alongside the practical cybersecurity cooperation Panama has sought from Israel to protect the Panama Canal itself, a separate infrastructure priority that intersects with any future direct aviation route given the canal's status as critical national infrastructure requiring the same kind of protection as an airport hub serving international carriers.

What would a direct Panama-Israel route require?

A viable direct route would most plausibly emerge through El Al's existing widebody fleet expansion rather than a new dedicated aircraft order, given the airline's stated strategy of using its growing 787 fleet to support long-haul expansion following the Buenos Aires launch. Panama's positioning as a connecting hub, rather than a final destination for most passengers, could make it a viable technical stop or codeshare extension of a broader Latin American strategy rather than a standalone route justified purely by point-to-point demand.

The demand-side case already exists in fragments: Panama's Jewish community numbers between 12,000 and 17,000 people, a documented driver of religious tourism covered in The Olam's Jewish life in Panama report, while Copa's own stopover program has demonstrated Panama's capacity to convert transit passengers into multi-day visitors at scale. What remains missing is the specific commercial decision, by either El Al or a codeshare partner, to connect those two pieces of existing demand and infrastructure into an actual flight route.