Customs officers seized untaxed tobacco from an Israeli passenger heading to Larnaca Airport in a Turkish Cypriot taxi on August 12, and said seizures involving Israeli nationals at the crossing points have risen at a worrying rate over the past two months.
Officers stopped the taxi at the Deryneia crossing point during routine checks under the Green Line Regulation. In the passenger’s luggage they found 15 cartons of 200 cigarettes each and three one-kilo packs of shisha tobacco, none carrying the health warnings in Greek and Turkish, the security feature or the unique traceability code, indications that the goods were untaxed.
Customs seized the tobacco, which will go through the required destruction process. Officers arrested the man for offences committed in the act and later released him after accepting his proposal to settle the case out of court for 2,000 euros.
Rising trend points to possible network
Customs said its seizure statistics from the crossing points show a worrying upward trend over the past two months involving Israeli nationals carrying mainly smuggled tobacco products out of the occupied areas for onward transport to Israel. This strengthens the department’s assessment that a specific network may be moving cigarettes from the occupied areas through the Republic of Cyprus to Israel, it said.
Two large seizures in February and November 2025 first pointed to a network shipping tobacco by boat from Cypriot shores to the Israeli coast, according to Customs. The network appears since to have switched to what is known as ant smuggling.
In that method, smugglers avoid moving a single large consignment and instead use many people carrying very small quantities each, like worker ants, making repeated trips so as not to raise suspicion and to stay below the radar of the authorities.
June and July figures
Seizures at the crossing points involving Israeli nationals came to 14% of the total in June, at 41 out of 288, and accounted for 30% of cigarettes seized, at 22,080 out of 72,620.
In July they reached 24.5% of the total, at 46 out of 188, and close to 50% of cigarettes seized, at 20,980 out of 42,050.
