About three weeks ago, information was provided from Israel (Dov Lask and Uri Barlev) about a planned joint issue involving Cyprus and Israel. Actually, it took some time to get detailed information and better quality images from the Cyprus side and we still not have complete data yet. Eventually, we gathered the following information. Both countries issued an identical stamp honoring the firefighters illustrated with a plane dropping water to put out a forest fire. Stamps were issued on April 4, 2023 and were produced in miniature sheets of 8 stamps [4×2] for Cyprus and 9 stamps [3×3] for Israel. In both cases the bottom margins are illustrated with flags of both countries, leading to the possibility to create out of a single miniature sheet, 4, respectively 3 stamps attached to tabs. Cyprus stamps were printed at 90,000 samples among which 4,000 were used to create FDCs.

Surprisingly, in the Cyprus miniature sheet, the top of the flag design from the tabs is overlapping the bottom of the stamps from the lower row of the miniature sheet. These parts of flags do not appear at the bottom of the upper row of stamps leading to the existence of two different stamps, the one of the top row (Type I – without parts of the flags) and the one of the bottom row (Type II – with parts of the flags), this one available of course with or without tab.