Israel just admitted it never checked the pilot who tried to crash a plane into it
1 hour ago · 4 October 2026Share
Flight deck of a Boeing 737 commercial airliner showing pilot stations. Sol Young from Philadelphia · CC BY 2.0
A flydubai co-pilot nearly crashed a plane full of passengers into the sea off Israel.
And he'd already been barred from flying in his own country over fears he held extremist views.
Nobody told Israel.
So here's what happened. Four days ago, flydubai flight FZ1073 was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv. The co-pilot attacked the captain, an Indian national called Smit Machchhar, inside the cockpit. The plane dropped about 17,000 feet.
Passengers and crew fought the attacker off. Two off-duty reserve pilots who happened to be on board took the controls. The plane made an emergency landing at Tabuk, in north-western Saudi Arabia. Saudi authorities arrested the co-pilot and handed him to the UAE, which is now leading the investigation.
Hamad Saif al-Shamsi, the UAE's Attorney General, says the co-pilot used the cockpit's emergency crash axe to attack the captain and tried to take the controls himself. He says it was an attempted terrorist act. The plane's transponder was switched to code 7500 during the attack. That's the code for a hijacking in progress.
Diplomatic contacts have named the co-pilot to the Associated Press as Hamam al-Hammami. He's Omani, born in the UAE to a Syrian mother. There's been no official confirmation of his identity yet.
But here's the part that matters most. Oman had already barred him from flying. Its aviation authorities had concerns he held extremist views, so they pulled him out of the cockpit and gave him an administrative job at Oman Air instead.
And Israel knew none of it.
Israel's Transportation Ministry now says it does not have the capacity to run background checks on foreign pilots. At all.
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Tel Aviv Airport in Israel, viewed from ground level. Andrew Nash from Vienna, Austria · CC BY-SA 2.0
Miri Regev, Israel's Transportation Minister, went on the Kan broadcaster and said quote "those who are supposed to identify the crew are security officials." So she's handing the job to Shin Bet and Mossad, Israel's security and intelligence agencies.
But the Transportation Ministry's own security division says that's not their job either. A representative told the Israeli outlet Ynet that the division is not an intelligence body that checks the background of foreigners. The division says it outsources those checks to the airlines. And it says it cannot guarantee flights are 100 percent safe.
So that's two arms of the same government, each pointing at someone else.
And there's a second contradiction sitting underneath it. Israel's Channel 12 reported that flydubai gave Israeli authorities the crew's names in advance, including al-Hammami's, and that the list raised no concern. The Transportation Ministry's security division says it never got the names at all. Both of those cannot be true.
Either way, Israel did not know Oman had already pulled this man from flying.
Here's why that's strange. flydubai's agreement to operate flights into Israel has a clause in it. All its pilots have to come from countries with normalised relations with Israel. That's according to a report in the Jerusalem Post. Oman has no formal diplomatic relations with Israel at all. So under flydubai's own agreement, al-Hammami arguably should never have been in that cockpit, whatever either side knew about his record. Israel's separate aviation agreement with the UAE, signed in 2020, has no clause on pilot nationality at all.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister, says Israel is looking into whether the co-pilot acted under anyone's direction. He's warned that anyone involved will pay what he called a heavy price. He's also said, without giving evidence, that the co-pilot went through what he called Islamist radicalisation.
A Gulf diplomat has told the Associated Press that the investigation has found no links to any militant group so far. That points toward him having acted alone. Security agencies from four countries in the region, helped by the United States and other Western governments, are now working to establish his motive. The UAE has not said in public what it believes that motive was, or whether it has concluded he acted alone.
flydubai has suspended every flight on its Israel route since the attack. Israel's El Al has cancelled its own scheduled flights too. Both are still suspended while the investigation goes on.
Israel has spent years building a reputation as the country whose aviation security cannot be beaten. This co-pilot got past it anyway. A clean record on paper. A government that never checked him. And a crash axe that was already sitting in the cockpit.
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