An Israeli Air Force Hercules transport aircraft landed near Tel Aviv Thursday afternoon, after a four-hour flight ferrying 33 Israelis wounded in Wednesday's suicide bombing on their tour bus at an airport in Burgas, Bulgaria.

On the tarmac at Ben-Gurion International Airport, 26 ambulances awaited the injured.

"The less-injured will be taken to hospitals where they live, and the more injured to the hospitals near the airport," Foreign Ministry Deputy Spokesman Paul Hirschson told Xinhua.

Four of the wounded sustained moderate to serious wounds in the blast, according to Israel Radio. Two pregnant women were among those hurt, as well as an 11-year-old child.

"Now, all we want to do is put them in ambulances and get them to hospitals," Hirschson said, noting that the injured were of all ages, and not only a youth group, according to some early reports. The wounded were being evacuated to hospitals throughout the country.

"The mission was to bring back our victims as quickly as possible to Israel," head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Medical Corps, Brig.-Gen. Itzik Kreis told reporters in a conference call on Thursday.

"IDF Chief of Staff, Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz ordered the Air Force medical command to launch a delegation immediately to Bulgaria," in the wake of the powerful blast, which blew out the vehicles windows and peeled back roofs.

In the early morning, the delegation joined forces with Israeli rescue services that had already been at a hospital in Burgas, Kreis said, and made a quick triage assessment of those who would be evacuated first.

"Three critically injured people are still in Sofia," Hirschson said, explaining that it was too risky to airlift them back home, at least at that point.

Kreis said that, although many of the arrivals suffered from " limb fractures, some of them with shrapnel injuries," he added that, "generally speaking, they are less seriously hurt than we expected."

He noted that his team said the wounded on the flight did not seem to have been overly traumatized by the attack, and that the types of injuries were the same as what Israelis have sustained in similar bus bombings over the past decade.

Hirschson said few if any of the families of the injured were at the airport for their arrival, "but are expected to be here later in the evening when the deceased and the three who are critically injured are flown back to Israel."