Al-Qaeda just called for copycat attacks on American and Israeli planes
1 hour ago · 4 October 2026Share
A Boeing 737 MAX 8 commercial aircraft on the ground. File photo. Sg1959 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Al-Qaeda supporters just called for new attacks on American and Israeli airliners.
And they're pointing to last week's flydubai hijacking attempt as the blueprint.
The call showed up in Al-Bayan, a weekly online magazine Al-Qaeda supporters have been running since July. It went up a couple of days ago. It came down the day after that. But not before it spread across Al-Qaeda-linked Telegram channels.
Here's the line from the article. Quote "the war is not over, and planes carrying Zionists and Americans can still be struck, as happened on September 11."
So they're putting last week's flight in the same sentence as 9/11. On purpose. The article even ran an image of a plane hitting the World Trade Center right next to an image about the flydubai attack.
Now here's the attack they're talking about.
Five days ago, a co-pilot named Hamam al-Hammami attacked his captain with the plane's emergency crash axe and tried to take the controls. He's from Oman. The captain he attacked, Smit Machchhar, is from India. The flight was flydubai FZ1073, Dubai to Tel Aviv, 174 people on board.
Flight-tracking data shows the plane dropped more than 17,000 feet in about two minutes. Then it climbed. Then it dropped again.
Passengers and crew fought al-Hammami off. Two off-duty pilots who happened to be on the flight took over and landed the plane in Tabuk, in Saudi Arabia.
And here's the part that should have been a warning sign. Oman had already banned al-Hammami from flying there, because of concerns about his extremist views.
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Dubai International Airport seen from above. File photo. Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology · CC BY-SA 3.0
The UAE's Attorney General, Hamad Saif al-Shamsi, says investigators have determined al-Hammami had begun carrying out a terrorist act. The UAE gets to run this investigation because the plane is UAE-registered. Right now, prosecutors in Abu Dhabi are going through his devices and the physical evidence to work out whether he acted alone or had links to extremist groups.
So what happened after he was arrested?
About nine hours later, while he was already in custody, a burst of posts went up on his LinkedIn and Instagram. They referenced Ayman al-Zawahiri. And Humam al-Balawi — the suicide bomber who killed seven CIA officers in Afghanistan in 2009. Both accounts were deleted soon after. Nobody knows who posted them, or whether they were scheduled in advance.
And here's the thing. No evidence has come out showing al-Hammami took orders from Al-Qaeda or anyone else. Israeli security officials believe he radicalised on his own and acted alone. But Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister, and Donald Trump, the US President, have both suggested somebody may have directed him. A senior US official has told NBC there's no sign Iran was involved at all.
Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism researcher, told the New York Post the group looks like it's trying to capitalise on the flydubai attack. He said the al-Balawi reference matters.
Anwar Gargash, a UAE presidential adviser, says the attack is a fresh warning that the fight against extremism in the region is not over.
The Transportation Security Administration says it is aware of the flydubai incident and is watching it closely. It hasn't said anything specifically about the Al-Qaeda call. No aviation security body anywhere has put out an official statement on the Al-Bayan article itself.
Flydubai's flights to Israel are still suspended while all this gets investigated.
So what don't we know? Whether this call is real Al-Qaeda strategy or just supporters freelancing online. Whether the group behind it can actually pull off what it's threatening. And the UAE still hasn't said publicly whether it believes al-Hammami acted alone.
Right now, a weekly online magazine has told its readers the war from September 11 is still going. And it's using a flight that nearly went down five days ago to prove it.
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