JERUSALEM • Israel rescinded the mandatory wearing of face masks outdoors and fully reopened schools yesterday in the latest return to relative normality, boosted by a mass vaccination campaign against the Covid-19 pandemic.

With almost 54 per cent of its 9.3 million population having received both shots of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, Israel has logged sharp drops in contagion and cases.

The police-enforced wearing of masks outdoors, ordered a year ago, was scrapped from yesterday, but the Health Ministry said the requirement still applied for indoor public spaces and urged citizens to keep masks at hand.

With kindergarteners, elementary and high school students already back in class, middle school students who had been kept at home or attended class sporadically returned to pre-pandemic schedules.

The Education Ministry said schools should continue to encourage personal hygiene, ventilation of classrooms and to maintain social distancing as much as possible.

Israel counts East Jerusalem Palestinians among its population and has been administering the vaccines there. The 5.2 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Islamist Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip have been receiving limited supplies of vaccines provided by Israel, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, the global Covax vaccine-sharing scheme and China.

REUTERS