A spokesman for the Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv has confirmed on Tuesday that the new coronaviruses variant, Omicron, has been detected in two Israeli doctors who returned from a conference in London in the past week.
The two doctors had received three doses of the Pfizer BioNtech vaccine, and have so far shown mild COVID- 19 symptoms, the hospital said.
It said that the doctor who had returned from Britain had probably infected his colleague.
In Israel, two more people have been identified as carrying the new variant, health officials have confirmed, one of whom was a tourist from Malawi who had received the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Israel shut its borders for 14 days on Saturday to foreigners from all countries to try to contain the spread of Omicron and introduced counter-terrorism phone-tracking technology to track contacts of a handful of people who have been infected.
Israel hopes that within 14 days it will know how effective COVID 19 vaccines are against Omicron. Around 57% of the country's 9.4 million population is fully vaccinated.