Dubai-Tel Aviv flight emergency: Israel investigates possible terrorist attack

Israel is pointing to the terrorist attack to explain what happened on board the FZ 1073 airliner operated by FlyDubai: the co-pilot stabbed the pilot during the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, forcing the vehicle and its 180 passengers on board to land in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. The Mossad and Shin Bet intelligence services are investigating the cause.

The pilot would be Omani and the co-pilot Emirati (and not Russian and Ukrainian as had been said at the beginning). This is not a small detail: only pilots from countries with open diplomatic relations can land in Israel. And this is not the case for Oman. Israeli Transport Minister Miri Regev has suspended all FlyDubai flights and asked the Aviation Authority to understand whether the Emirates have violated the agreement signed with Israel.

The Israeli Security Minister Ben Gvir first endorsed the thesis of the terrorist attack. ''The naive belief that our enemies love life and that we should have compassion for them received a further reminder this morning in the form of a terrorist who planned to crash a plane and kill the 180 Israelis on board,'' he wrote on X.

“Terrorism is a devil with which no agreement must be reached other than to defeat it and eliminate it from the face of the earth. Israel has done an extraordinary job in the last two and a half years, but we must not stop and we must continue until the final victory in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, Judea and Samaria,'' he continued. An Israeli official said “a pilot was trying to replicate 9/11.”

The idea is spreading in Israel that the Islamic Republic of Iran may be behind the emergency. "It still remains to be clarified whether the co-pilot was operating on behalf of Iran or had received instructions from the Iranian side," writes the Yedioth Ahronot newspaper. Defense Minister Israel Katz says he is sure that it "was an attempted jihadist attack".

In less than a minute, the plane plummeted from 34,000 to 14,000 feet after one of the men involved in the altercation lost consciousness. The vehicle suffered damage to the tail rudder, probably caused by the rapid dive.

"The rudder of Flydubai's Boeing sustained serious damage during today's rapid descent. The rudder was damaged due to the rapid and very steep descent at high speed, which subjected the structure to extreme aerodynamic loads. These stresses exceeded the design limits of the component", we read on Aviation Reporter's X profile.

What saved the situation was a team of pilots who were on the plane for a transfer: they managed, it seems together with some passengers, to enter the cabin and avoid the worst. “There are people with their shirts completely covered in blood,” one witness said.