JERUSALEM/DUBAI/TEL AVIV (Reuters) – Pᴀssengers on a flydubai flight reached Israel safely on Wednesday after customers and crew foiled a co-pilot’s attempt to crash the aircraft, Israeli officials said, in a struggle that began when he stabbed the pilot and sent the jet plunging nearly 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds.
Pᴀssengers and crew entered the cockpit, overpowered the co-pilot and enabled a second pair of flydubai pilots who were aboard the flight to land the jet safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, Israeli officials said.
More than 10 hours later, the pᴀssengers arrived at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport aboard a flydubai replacement aircraft, with several describing the episode as a miracle and recounting a frantic struggle to prevent a catastrophe.
Israeli officials said the attacker’s motive aboard flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv remained under investigation. Israel and the United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai, signed the Abraham Accords normalizing relations in 2020.
The incident sharpened concerns about global aviation security in a region scarred by years of conflict, prompting Israel to тιԍнтen checks on pilots flying into the country.
“I just can say that it was a miracle. It was awful, crazy, and we thank God that we survived it, we didn’t think we will make it but thank God we are in Israel. We are back home. And we are happy to see everyone here,” pᴀssenger Lital Shachaf said.
Israel’s ambulance service said a 51-year-old man was taken to an Israeli hospital to be treated for injuries to his upper body. The man was in a “mild condition,” it said.
Describing the event as “a serious security incident,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saudi authorities would interrogate the co-pilot.
Flydubai said in a statement that the underlying reasons for the event remained unknown and warned against “premature speculation.” An Israeli official identified the co-pilot as an Omani national. There was no immediate comment from Oman.
Israeli officials applauded the pᴀssengers, who they credited with avoiding a much more serious disaster. Netanyahu said there were 174 people on board the flight from Dubai, most of them Israeli nationals.
US President Donald Trump said he spoke “at length” with Netanyahu on Wednesday about the incident. He proceeded to give reporters in the Oval Office a detailed account of what happened, adding: “This is the story that I heard — I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s the story that I got from Bibi (Netanyahu).”
‘Something You Do without Thinking’
A Netanyahu spokesperson told Reuters that the wounded captain, identified by the Israeli leader’s office as Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, was covered with blood on the floor when he managed to click the release to open the cockpit door. Pᴀssengers who entered found the co-pilot bashing at the plane’s control panel, the spokesperson said. “This is something you do without thinking, just running to save your daughter’s life, your family’s life,” said Asaf Rajuan, one of the pᴀssengers who helped restrain the attacker. He spoke with a forehead still bloodied from the struggle.
Netanyahu’s office released a video showing the prime minister at Ben Gurion Airport giving a hug to another pᴀssenger, Yaniv Hayun, who his office said “broke into” the cockpit. “I see you and I see a lion – a big hero,” Netanyahu told the man, who was still wearing the blood-stained shirt he had on during the flight.
Flydubai operates daily return flights between Dubai and Tel Aviv, a route that is popular among Israeli nationals. The flight path normally uses airspace over Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
It is not the first time a flight between Israel and the UAE has landed in Saudi Arabia. A flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv made an emergency landing in Riyadh in September 2025 due to a medical incident, Israeli media reported at the time.
Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk airport, where the plane landed, said both pilots had been hospitalized after sustaining injuries.
The incident heightened security fears in Israel weeks before Israelis vote in the first election since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks, with Israel’s security figuring prominently in the campaigning.
Responding to the incident on X, far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote, “Terrorism is a devil with whom no agreement must be reached.”
Israel to тιԍнтen Checks on Pilots Flying to Israel
Israeli media published conflicting reports on the incident, with some outlets reporting that a pilot had tried to crash the pᴀssenger plane in an alleged suicide attempt. Some Israeli media outlets initially identified the pilots as Omani and Emirati nationals, while others said they were Russian and Ukrainian.
“Every pilot that is going to be flying into Israel, we are going to know the pilots’ idenтιтies, know who they are, and do some type of security check,” Doron Spielman, a Netanyahu spokesperson, told Reuters.
Netanyahu met on Sunday with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan during a rare visit to the Gulf country. Israel and the UAE have forged close security, military and economic ties since establishing diplomatic ties.
Israel provided the UAE earlier this year with Iron Dome air-defense systems and Israeli personnel to operate them, helping defend against Iranian attacks launched after Israel and the US began strikes on Iran.
The UAE government had yet to comment on the flydubai incident, while the Dubai state-owned airline said an “altercation” occurred in the cockpit and the flight subsequently diverted to Tabuk, where it landed safely. The UAE’s aviation regulator, the GCAA, said the flight “experienced a security incident that was brought under control.”
💔 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.
