Israel Orders Foreign Flight Security Review After Flydubai Attack

Israel ordered a review of foreign flight security after the flydubai attack, while conflicting accounts of crew screening exposed questions about responsibility for protecting inbound passengers.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a review of security arrangements for foreign airlines flying to Israel on Sunday, October 4, after the attack aboard flydubai Flight FZ1073 raised questions about how an alleged terrorist reached the cockpit of an Israel-bound aircraft.

The immediate dispute concerns a crucial distinction: information reaching Israel does not establish that the office responsible for acting on it received, assessed or cleared it. Accounts published on Sunday leave that chain of responsibility unresolved.

A crew list, and conflicting accounts

Regional officials told The Associated Press that Emirati authorities supplied Israel with passenger and crew information, including nationalities, before the flight. They said Israel raised no objections to anyone listed. AP granted the officials anonymity because they lacked authorization to discuss the investigation publicly.

That is an account from officials involved in the region, not a published audit of the information trail. It identifies a question for investigators without settling who personally saw the data or what information accompanied it.

The Transportation Ministry gave a different account of its own involvement. In a response reported by The Times of Israel, it said it had neither received the crew list nor possessed access to flight lists. It said flydubai had confirmed in writing that required crew checks and nationality restrictions were built into its assignment procedures.

The same report said the Israel Tax Authority confirmed to Haaretz that its passenger data center received the list. Whether the Transportation Ministry subsequently obtained it remained unclear. Both statements can therefore be true: one Israeli body could have received information that another says it never saw.

What the captain described

The stakes behind that administrative dispute are illustrated by Captain Smit Machchhar's account, published by The Times of Israel on October 4. He told Netanyahu that co-pilot Hamam al-Hammami struck him repeatedly from behind during the September 30 flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv.

Machchhar said he initially thought the aircraft had suffered damage, then realized the other man in the cockpit was attacking him. Injured and struggling to see, he eventually opened the cockpit door, allowing people outside to intervene.

The newspaper reported that the UAE prosecutor general described an attack with the cockpit's emergency ax. The aircraft landed in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Those details explain why the current inquiry extends beyond passenger screening: the accused attacker was a member of the flight crew.

Where the existing checks stopped

In a separate briefing reported by The Times of Israel, the Transportation Ministry's security division said it relied on foreign airlines to conduct background checks. It said it lacked personnel abroad and the intelligence capacity to investigate every foreign pilot individually.

Officials also said they could not specify how many pilots from hostile states had flown into Israel. Transportation Minister Miri Regev maintained that intelligence and threat assessments belonged to the security establishment. These are the ministry's explanations, not findings that absolve it or establish another agency's liability.

The policy issue is therefore more precise than demanding an impossible guarantee of perfect safety. A credible review needs to establish who collects a crew member's identity, who checks restrictions and warnings, and who can prevent an assignment when a problem appears.

A review still needs decisions

According to The Jerusalem Post, the examiner appointed through the National Security Council will review the security failures but will not have direct authority to change policy. That separates the investigation from the decisions needed to implement its conclusions.

The next concrete steps are the examiner's appointment and the review's terms. The October 4 announcement did not provide a public completion deadline; identifying who must act on the findings will be as important as identifying who failed to act before the flight.