Israel will ban the entry of all foreigners on the Omicron variant Coronavirus pandemic News

The ban, which is awaiting government approval, will take effect from midnight Sunday through Monday.

Israel says it will ban all foreigners from entering the country, and it will become the first nation to completely close its borders in the face of a new and potentially more contagious one. a variant of coronavirus.

Speaking on Saturday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said the ban would last for 14 days until approved by the government.

Officials hope that during this period there will be more information on how effective COVID-19 vaccines are against Omicron, which was and was first detected in South Africa. duplicated A “variant of concern” for the World Health Organization.

“Our working hypotheses are that the variant already exists in almost every country,” Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked told N12’s Meet the Press. “And that the vaccine is effective, even though we still don’t know at what level.”

The ban will take effect at midnight from Sunday to Monday. On Friday, a ban was imposed on foreigners coming from most African states.

Harry Fawcett of Al Jazeera, reported from West Jerusalem, said the new measures were “very stringent” and said they had a major reversal of the policy that allowed foreign tourists in early November.

“They are the result of a late-night emergency meeting of the coronavirus cabinet after Saturday afternoon Naftali Bennett announced that Israel must act very quickly in the face of all this uncertainty and not jeopardize the progress it has already made. Against coronavirus.”

The new measures will require all Israelis entering the country, including those vaccinated, to be quarantined.

Fawcett said vaccinated Israelis should be quarantined for at least three days, and those without the vaccine should stay for seven days.

He added: “And if they return from a new African red list country, they will have to go to forty government hotels until it is negative.”

Separately, Israeli Prime Minister Bennett said the Shin Bet counterterrorism agency’s telephone tracking technology will be used to find carriers of the new variant to reduce transmission to others.

Turned on and off since March 2020, surveillance technology paired the locations of virus carriers to determine who they were contacting with other cell phones in the area.

The Israeli Supreme Court this year limited the scope of use after civil rights groups filed lawsuits over privacy issues.

Variation, in fact detect In Belgium, Botswana, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany and the UK, it has sparked a wave of global concerns and travel, although epidemiologists say these restrictions may be too late to prevent Omicron from circulating worldwide.

Israel has so far confirmed one case of Omicron, with seven alleged cases.

The Ministry of Health has not said whether the person in the confirmed case was vaccinated. Three of the seven people in the alleged cases were fully incarcerated, the ministry said on Saturday, and three had not recently returned from a trip abroad.

About 57 percent of Israel’s 9.4 million people are fully vaccinated, according to the Ministry of Health, which means they have received the third vaccine from the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine or it is still less than five months since they received the second dose.

Israel has confirmed 1.3 million COVID-19 cases and recorded more than 8,000 deaths since the pandemic began.