Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz called the flydubai incident “an attempted jihadist terror attack” within hours of the plane touching down, before anybody had investigated a thing. Netanyahu released a video. Transportation Minister Miri Regev demanded a ban on every flydubai flight to Israel.
Flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv on Wednesday morning with 174 passengers, 166 of them Israeli. Somewhere over Jordan, something went badly wrong in the cockpit. The plane dropped 17,400 feet in under two minutes, transmitted a hijack code, and landed in Tabuk, in Saudi Arabia. Passengers say one pilot stabbed the other. Both pilots were taken to hospital. The airline says only that an altercation occurred in the flight deck and that its own crew traveling on the flight secured the aircraft.
That’s all anyone knew when Katz handed down his verdict. It went around the world anyway, printed beside an airline statement that claimed far less.
I don’t know what happened in that cockpit. Katz doesn’t either. He picked a motive before anyone had finished questioning the crew, and the motive was the part his government needed. A government with Israel’s record of staging attacks and inventing stories has no benefit of the doubt left. Every claim Israel makes should arrive with a question stapled to it.
Almost everything we’ve been told about the attacker comes from one side. The claim that he was the co-pilot and an Omani national reached the world through Israeli officials briefing CNN, one of them anonymously. Flydubai has not named its pilots or said where they are from. The Israeli outlet JFeed reported that he was handed to Saudi authorities, with Israeli intelligence involved in the questioning. He hasn’t said a word in public, and so far every motive pinned on him has come from Israeli officials.
How did he get into that seat at all? Israeli sources told the Jerusalem Post that flydubai’s agreement to fly into Israel requires its pilots to hold passports from countries with diplomatic ties to Israel. Oman has none. Israel National News reports that crew from Arab and Gulf states go through individual security screening before they are cleared to land. CNN noted it is not yet clear how an Omani pilot got that clearance, and an Israeli official told the network it is one of the main questions investigators are asking. Israeli authorities say they are now checking whether he held a second passport. Flydubai still has confirmed none of this. So either Israel’s screening cleared him, nobody screened him, or he flew on another passport. Each of those is its own scandal. If Israeli security vetted and approved him, I’d like to know what they saw. If nobody checked, how long has a rule on a route this sensitive been sitting unenforced? And if he came in on a second passport, whose was it, and who waved it through? Why it took a stabbing for Israel’s transportation minister to care is a question of its own.
Israeli officials told CNN the Omani co-pilot stabbed the captain. Nick Schifrin, a PBS correspondent, posted that a senior Israeli official told him the reverse: the Omani pilot tried to take over the plane, and his Emirati co-pilot stabbed him. Another official told the Jerusalem Post that authorities were still working to determine which pilot did the stabbing. Ynet reported the captain was Indian; other outlets called him Emirati. The off-duty pilots who took the controls were a South African and a New Zealander in one account, a Russian and a Ukrainian in Israel Hayom’s, and “former pilots” in the PBS post. Some of that is just the fog of a breaking story, and I’d cut anyone slack for it. The verdict, though, never moved. The same PBS source called it a “9/11 style attack” and “a miracle during Sukkot.” It didn’t matter which pilot held the knife. In every version the villain was Omani and the heroes were Israeli, and nobody ever stopped saying jihad.
Netanyahu said a passenger told him that he “somehow” managed to break into the cockpit with a crew member and subdue the attacker as he tried to sabotage the aircraft’s systems. Since 9/11, cockpit doors on commercial jets are reinforced and locked in flight, built to stop exactly that. On most airliners, crew outside can enter an emergency access code, and the pilots inside can let them in or keep them out. So how did they get in? Maybe the wounded captain opened it himself, or off-duty crew knew the code, or the door failed. Nobody has said. And then there’s the knife. Pilots are normally screened before boarding, so how did a blade end up in the cockpit of a flight to Israel?
CNN reports investigators will examine how the door was opened, how the weapon came on board, and the co-pilot’s medical and training history. Netanyahu has already told Israel’s security establishment to prepare for “potential additional threats,” which stretches Tuesday’s warning a little further before anyone has answered a single one of these questions.
Everyone on that plane survived. But something about the way this story has been put together feels wrong to me. The suspect is in Saudi custody, Israeli intelligence is reportedly in the room, and the only story reaching the public is the one Israeli officials settled on within hours. This needs an independent investigation by civil aviation investigators answerable to none of the governments with a stake in the story, with the flight recorder data and the findings made public. Until that happens, treat every account of FZ1073, including Israel’s, as unverified.
On Sunday, three days before the flight, Netanyahu flew secretly to the UAE, with the head of the Mossad and his national security chief in the delegation. Israeli officials told Reuters the meeting with Mohamed bin Zayed lasted six hours and focused on Iran. The AP reported that Netanyahu went to ask the Emirati president to deny reports that bin Zayed had warned him about a Hamas attack days before October 7, a story his rivals have seized on four weeks before the vote.
Israel’s Channel 14, citing an Emirati source, reported that the Abu Dhabi talks widened into a second session with officials from ten countries, among them Saudi Arabia and Oman, to discuss a regional defense front against Iran and the Houthis. None of those governments has confirmed it, and other Israeli outlets reported a different guest list. Ynet reported that the Mossad chief arranged the meeting after Saudi Arabia asked for Israeli help against the Houthis. Three days later, a flydubai jet left the UAE carrying 166 Israelis, an Omani pilot and, by Ynet’s account, an Indian captain, and it came down in Saudi Arabia. The UAE, Oman and Saudi Arabia, three of the countries reportedly at that table, each ended up with a part in Wednesday’s story. That’s a tidy cast for a story nobody has finished investigating.
On Tuesday, the day before the flight, Netanyahu stood in front of a fighter jet at Tel Nof air base and filmed a warning: “We have indications that, ahead of the elections, our enemies will try to attack us.” He gave no details. Israelis vote on October 27, and a recent poll shows a tie between his bloc and the opposition. Opposition leaders demanded assurances that the warning was no attempt to undermine the election, and Yair Lapid called it fearmongering. Lapid, who was briefed by Netanyahu’s office that day, said nothing in the briefing resembled what happened on the plane. The next morning a plane full of Israelis plunged over Jordan, and the warning looked like prophecy. So which was it? If Netanyahu’s indications pointed at aviation, why did a Tel Aviv flight carrying 166 Israelis take off with no extra precautions anyone has described? If they didn’t, why should anyone treat Wednesday as proof he was right?
Benjamin Netanyahu is the most dangerous man on the planet, and nobody needs a war more than he does. He has been on trial in his own country since 2020 for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, and he has asked for a pardon that has not come. The International Criminal Court has wanted him since 2024 for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and attacking civilians, and for crimes against humanity including murder and persecution. A frightened country stops asking about any of that. Every threat, real or inflated, drags the conversation out of his courtroom and onto the battlefield, where he looks strongest. Anyone who treats that warning, and the speed with which his ministers cashed in on Wednesday’s flight, as a coincidence is an easy mark.
By Wednesday afternoon the machine was running. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir used the flight to demand “total victory” in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank: four fronts hung on one knife on one plane. Even Avigdor Lieberman, no friend to any Palestinian, accused government officials of spinning the incident for political gain.
Israel wanted the pictures, too. According to Reuters, it asked Saudi Arabia to let its military fly the passengers home, and the Air Force readied Super Hercules transports. Israeli media reported three of them standing by. Hercules planes flew the 1976 Entebbe raid, where Netanyahu’s older brother Yoni was killed leading the assault force, and a senior Israeli official had already told Channel 12 that Wednesday could have ended as another 9/11 or another Entebbe. Riyadh, which has no diplomatic relations with Israel, said no. Saudi medics cared for the passengers at Tabuk, and flydubai sent its own plane to bring them home. Netanyahu, a man the International Criminal Court wants arrested, was already describing his meeting with one of the passengers now being hailed as a hero.
The war on Iran hangs over all of it. Washington and Tehran are trading proposals to end it, and Iran says it has received Washington’s response to its latest one. An alleged jihadist plot against a plane full of Israelis, flying out of the country Netanyahu had just visited to talk about Iran, is the kind of event that can sink a negotiation. Whether this flight turns out to be one man’s crime or something more, Wednesday handed Netanyahu a new enemy and a new pretext to escalate his war on Iran, four weeks before an election.
By Wednesday evening, Tehran was accusing Israel of plotting exactly this kind of attack. Fars, the news agency tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, reported that Iranian intelligence had learned of a scenario the Mossad pitched to Netanyahu’s office: an attack on aircraft or airports in the region, designed to cause mass casualties and be pinned on Tehran. Fars offered no evidence. Meanwhile, Israeli security officials were examining possible Iranian involvement in the flydubai incident. Iran’s claim comes from a party to the war and should be weighed like one. Israel’s claims deserve the same scrutiny, and they almost never get it.
