Its owners, 60-year-old twin brothers Ata and Khamis al-Sairafi, expect to welcome their first customers within weeks at the site in an isolated mountain area near Nablus.
Inside the cabin, the seats have been stripped out and the window panes removed. Tables will soon be fitted in the fuselage, which has been painted white with laminated wooden floors.
The brothers plan to call their aviation-themed eatery “the Palestinian-Jordanian Airline Restaurant and Coffee Shop Al-Sairafi Nablus” and aim to expand it into an event space.
“The cockpit will be a suitable place for any newlyweds who come to us for their wedding ceremony.”
Ata said he and his brother were working as scrap-metal traders two decades ago when he learnt about the 1980s-era passenger plane sitting near Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel.
They purchased it in 1999, even though there was, and still is, no airport in the Palestinian territories.
The brothers negotiated with the Israeli owner, who sold it to them for US$100,000 with the engines removed.
“We received the plane without any equipment that would enable it to fly,” Ata said. “We had to move it from Israel, which was a complicated process.”
The twins paid an Israeli company US$20,000 to move the jet to the West Bank. The 13-hour transport was coordinated between the Israeli and Palestinian sides.
Key roads were closed so the plane could be rolled on a giant tow truck, its wings temporarily separated, to its current location.
“Loads of media outlets covered it, and the Israeli police intervened to organise the transfer,” recalled Khamis.
‘A strange idea’
The twins said they had hoped to run the restaurant out of the plane since 2000.
“The events in the Palestinian territories at that time hindered our project, and we thought of reviving it two years ago, but the spread of the coronavirus also prevented us from doing so,” Khamis said.
The project faces one more, environmental, challenge. The plane sits on property abutting a waste-sorting station which the twins are trying to convince local authorities to move elsewhere.
Ultimately, they said they are hopeful their project will finally take wing after being grounded for nearly a quarter-century.
“Having an aircraft in the Palestinian territories,” said Khamis, “is such a strange idea that I’m sure it will be a success.”