The Omani co-pilot who stabbed his captain in an apparent attempt tocrash an Israel-bound flight from Dubai had previously undergone radical Islamist indoctrination and was suicidal, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has claimed.
Israeli pᴀssengers intervened to stop the attack on Wednesday, restraining the co-pilot, while a reserve crew in the plane was able to stabilise the plummeting plane and ultimately land it safely in Saudi Arabia.
The plane had more than 170 people onboard and Israeli officials praised the bravery of those who intervened, announcing that four of the Israeli pᴀssengers would receive a “heroism” award for preventing a potential disaster.
Netanyahu told Fox News: “We know that he underwent Islamic radical indoctrination. That appears to be something we are gathering from his personal information.”
The co-pilot, whose idenтιтy is still not known, was being interrogated by Saudi security services, which arrested him on the plane’s arrival in Tabuk, in the north-west of the country.
Saudi investigators were cooperating with the United Arab Emirates, the US, Oman and Israel to try to determine the attacker’s motive, a regional official familiar with the investigation said. “All possible scenarios, from terrorism to mental disorders, are being looked into. Nothing is ruled out for now,” they told the ᴀssociated Press.
Two Israeli security officials said that Israel’s initial ᴀssessment was that the co-pilot was probably acting alone, Reuters reported.
Netanyahu said that the co-pilot was probably suicidal, citing preliminary “indications”.
“It looks very likely that he was going to down the plane … The Islamist tendencies, that radicalisation that are found in his background, I think that’s a pretty good clue,” he said, emphasising that final conclusions had yet to be made.
Netanyahu had previously said it was “too early to say” if there was any state backing – namely Iranian – of the attack. Two Israeli security sources told Reuters that they had not yet found Iranian involvement.
The attack came just days after Netanyahu warned of an unspecified security threat to Israel that could come during its October election.
The Israeli military had said before the incident it had no specific intelligence of an imminent threat and the opposition leader Yair Lapid said that a security briefing on Tuesday night included no mention of a related threat.
Other Israeli officials, including the defence minister, Israel Katz, and the ambᴀssador to the UN, Danny Danon, suggested the incident was a “terror attack”, with the Israeli foreign ministry briefing its diplomats that the attack was against Israel and its relationship with the UAE.
Donald Trump suggested the co-pilot was “perhaps a terrorist or perhaps a whack job”, and told reporters at the White House that he and Netanyahu had spoken at length.
Netanyahu also spoke to the president of the UAE, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who agreed to Israel’s involvement in the investigation.
Flydubai said its flights to and from Israel would be suspended while the investigation took place and urged all parties “to refrain from premature speculation while authorities gather the facts”.
The UAE announced on Thursday that it would conduct its own investigation into the incident, which started about two and a half hours after takeoff from Dubai. It said its investigators had begun to look into the attacker’s motive and if he had any links to any “terrorist purpose”.
Pᴀssengers said they saw a knife-wielding man – apparently the Omani co-pilot – putting the captain of the plane on the floor, after which the plane began to plummet.
The wounded pilot, Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, managed to send out an emergency signal and open the cockpit door, allowing pᴀssengers to enter and stop the plane’s descent.
A video shared by the prime minister’s office showed one pᴀssenger, Yaniv Hayoun, a plumber, speaking to Netanyahu at length about how the events onboard had played out.
Hayoun told the prime minister he and other pᴀssengers heard screaming and felt the air pressure change as the plane dived before they forced their way into the cockpit and found the attacker at the instrument panel. “I grabbed the attacker, put him in a chokehold, and dragged him out first,” Hayoun said during the meeting with Netanyahu after the plane had landed safely and the pᴀssengers were flown to Israel.
Machchhar was widely praised for his bravery, with Netanyahu and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, hailing him as a hero. India’s ambᴀssador to the UAE met the wounded captain’s family and briefed them on his recovery, the Indian consulate in the UAE said.
Machchhar was being treated in a hospital in Tabuk, but was in good health and recovering well, according to the Indian embᴀssy in the UAE, which said the ambᴀssador had visited the pilot.
“Captain Smit Machchhar is a HERO,” Modi said, in a post on social media. “In the face of the gravest danger and despite being seriously injured, he showed immense courage and an unwavering resolve to protect the lives of others.”
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
