Before last Wednesday’s Flydubai flight to Tel Aviv, the United Arab Emirates had already handed Israel the list of everyone on board, crew included, with names and nationalities. The co-pilot’s attack on the cockpit exposed security gaps that Israel is now moving to close. It also showed a Gulf partner treating Israel’s security as a shared responsibility. That is what peace looks like.
What happened on board
The UAE, which is leading the investigation, said the co-pilot attacked the flight’s captain with the cockpit’s crash ax and tried to take control of the plummeting plane in what it called a “terrorist attack” on Wednesday. According to the Associated Press report published by The Washington Post, his actions nearly crashed the flight, with 182 people on board, before the Indian captain managed to open the cockpit door, allowing passengers and others to rush in and subdue the attacker.
The passengers who halted the attack and helped regain control of the aircraft have been hailed as heroes in Israel.
Officials have said the co-pilot, an Omani national, had been barred from flying by his own country because of concerns about his extremist views. It remains unclear how a citizen of Oman, an Arab country that has no diplomatic relations with Israel, was allowed to fly a planeload of Israelis to Tel Aviv.
The list was shared
Regional officials said on Sunday that Emirati authorities had shared with Israel a list of passengers and crew ahead of the flight, including their nationalities. Israel had not raised red flags on any passenger or crew member, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Sharing the list is standard aviation procedure. Inside Israel, responsibility for vetting it has become a matter of dispute. The Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, said the Transportation Ministry is responsible for vetting passenger lists from foreign flights. Transportation Minister Miri Regev said on X that the security agencies are responsible for flight security and that her ministry was not given a list of passengers or any warnings. The head of aviation security at the ministry, Dvir Rubenstien, told Army Radio that it relies on local security checks and does not have the tools to run checks on each passenger on every flight.
A crown prince at the captain’s bedside
On Friday, Oct. 2, Dubai Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum visited the injured Indian captain, Smit Machchhar, at a hospital in Abu Dhabi, in a visit documented by the Government of Dubai Media Office.
An Emirati carrier, an Emirati investigation, an Emirati description of the attack as terrorism and an Emirati leader at the bedside of the man who saved a plane full of Israelis: none of this was guaranteed a few years ago.
Netanyahu orders a full review
On Sunday, four days after the attempt to crash the plane was thwarted, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had ordered National Security Council chief Shmuel Ben Ezra to appoint an examiner to conduct a thorough review of all security aspects of foreign civilian aviation to Israel, Haaretz reported. The AP quoted the mandate as a review of “all security aspects regarding foreign civil aviation to Israel.”
Netanyahu had said on Thursday that Israel has long-standing agreements with foreign carriers to keep pilots from flying into the country if they are citizens of nations that do not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. With elections due at the end of the month, opposition figures have seized on the failures. Yair Golan, head of the opposition Democrats party, wrote on X: “This is exactly what system collapse looks like.”
Why the Accords held
The lesson of this flight runs opposite to what Israel’s enemies would wish. The danger came from a country with no ties to Israel. The country that does have ties shared its data before take-off, called the attack terrorism and sent its crown prince to the hospital.
Philip Baum, a visiting professor of aviation security at Coventry University, told the AP that there are “huge limitations on doing background checks in any case, especially in cross-border checks.” That is precisely the argument for deeper cooperation between Israel and its Abraham Accords partners, not less. The examiner’s review should fix what failed in Israel’s own vetting. The partnership with the Emiratis that made the list available in the first place is the part that worked.
Sources
- The Washington Post (Associated Press) — Melanie Lidman and Samy Magdy, “UAE had shared details about FlyDubai flight with Israel, including pilots’ names and nationalities”, October 4, 2026
- Haaretz — Jonathan Lis and Michael Hauser Tov, “Netanyahu Orders Probe of Aviation Guidelines, Four Days After Flydubai Hijacking Attempt”, October 4, 2026