European Union governments agreed on Monday to remove Israel from the EU's safe travel list as the Health Ministry reported that country's COVID-19 death toll topped 7,000.
The move means Israeli visitors and those from five other countries are likely to face tighter controls, such as COVID-19 tests and quarantines.
The United States, Kosovo, Lebanon, Montenegro, and North Macedonia have also been taken off. The list seeks to unify travel rules across the bloc, although it does not bind individual EU nations, which are free to determine their own border policies.
The bloc still lets in most non-EU visitors who are fully vaccinated, although tests and periods of quarantine can apply, depending on the EU country of arrival.
Meanwhile, Israel — a country that seemed to have all but beaten the pandemic just two and a half months ago — has reached a dire landmark, with 7,030 Israelis succumbing to the disease since the onset of the pandemic early last year.
As the country continued to battle through a swelling coronavirus outbreak, health authorities also said that 6,621 people have tested positive for the pathogen out of some 92,000 tests carried out on Sunday, putting the country's infection rate at 7.2%.
Israeli hospitals were treating 736 COVID-19 patients in serious condition, 163 of whom were connected to ventilators.
Israel on Sunday opened its coronavirus vaccine booster shot campaign to the entire public in an effort to stave off the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant.
So far, 2,102,426 Israelis had received their supplementary jab, which is available to everyone who got their last coronavirus shot more than five months earlier.