A request to certify a class action lawsuit was filed last week in Tel Aviv District Court against El Al Israel Airlines, alleging that the carrier refunds passengers for canceled flights in installments rather than as a full and immediate payment, even in cases where the customer had already paid for the ticket in full long before the flight was canceled.

The request, filed on behalf of an El Al customer who is herself an attorney, estimates the total damage to the proposed class at more than 2.5 million shekels (roughly $675,000). The applicant is represented by attorneys Nitzan Gadot and Doron Radai of the Radai-Gadot law firm.

The legal theory turns on a question of timing rather than the broader nonpayment claims that have generated previous lawsuits against the airline. The applicant alleges that El Al operates under an improper practice: when a flight is canceled, the airline refunds the payment in the same number of installments in which the original ticket was purchased, even in cases where the full amount had already been collected from the customer months earlier.

That practice, the request argues, violates Israel’s Aviation Services Law of 2012, which requires a full refund to be issued within 21 days of a flight cancellation and grants the airline no right to break that refund into installments. By stretching the refund across future credit-card cycles, the lawsuit alleges, El Al is “tying up the customer’s credit limit and denying them the ability to make immediate use of their money,” while continuing to hold funds it is no longer entitled to keep.

“By continuing to hold passengers’ money after their flights were canceled for a period exceeding the refund period set by law, El Al is unjustly enriching itself at their expense and effectively turning passengers whose flights were canceled into a source of financing for itself,” the request states.

The applicant’s individual case, as described in the filing, is straightforward. She purchased a Sun d’Or ticket — Sun d’Or is El Al’s leisure subsidiary — to Warsaw for her daughter, and paid for it in two installments. She completed payment in January 2026.

The flight was scheduled for April. At the end of March, El Al canceled it, citing new directives for the operation of Ben Gurion Airport that significantly reduced flight activity. The carrier then credited the refund back to the applicant’s card in two future installments, rather than issuing the full amount immediately, despite the fact that, by the time of cancellation, El Al had been holding the full ticket price for roughly two months.

“Why, then, once the ticket was canceled by El Al, is the refund being delayed by the company?” the applicant asked, according to the filing.

When she contacted El Al to ask why the refund was being processed in installments after the payment had already been received in full, the airline allegedly told her that the matter was the responsibility of the credit-card company, which it said was the party actually issuing the credit in installments. The applicant says she then went to the credit-card company, which gave her the opposite answer, telling her that the installment structure had been determined by El Al.

That contradiction, the filing argues, exposes the practice: the airline, not the card company, is the one structuring the refund.
In a brief response, El Al said: “The statement of claim in question has not yet been received by the company. Once it is received, the company will study it and respond through the legal proceeding as customary.”

The new suit is the latest in a series of refund and cancellation-related class actions filed against El Al over the past several years, though it focuses on a narrower and more technical question than its predecessors.

During the early COVID period in 2020, El Al faced a $400 million class action in the Central District Court in Lod over its failure to refund passengers at all for flights canceled during the pandemic. The Knesset later passed temporary legislation amending the Aviation Services Law to give carriers an extension on refund timing during that period, somewhat blunting the earlier suit.

In the summer of 2025, a fresh wave of class actions followed the closure of Israeli airspace during the war with Iran. One suit, filed against El Al and eight other carriers in the Lod district court, sought 825 million shekels in damages on behalf of passengers whose flights were canceled or significantly delayed after airspace closures beginning June 13, 2025. A separate class action, filed by attorneys Aharon Topper and Gal Rosenfeld, alleged that El Al had broken a public commitment to seat stranded customers on evacuation flights before opening sales to the general public, leaving “tens of thousands” of customers to repurchase tickets at sharply inflated prices.

The current case, by contrast, does not allege that El Al failed to refund passengers at all. It alleges that the airline is refunding them in a manner the Aviation Services Law does not permit, and is doing so even when the structural justification — that the original payment is still being collected in installments — no longer applies.

The Aviation Services Law gives Israeli air passengers some of the most generous statutory protections in the world, with mandatory refunds within 21 days for canceled flights and additional compensation of up to NIS 3,000 per passenger when an airline cancels with less than 14 days’ notice. The 21-day refund window does not, on its face, contemplate installments.

The case was filed at a moment when El Al’s commercial position remains strong but its customer-service reputation has been battered by repeated rounds of flight disruption since October 2023 — first from the war in Gaza, then from the closure of Israeli airspace during the direct exchange with Iran, and most recently from the operational restrictions that grounded the Warsaw flight at the heart of the new lawsuit.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)