The hijacking of the Dubai airliner carrying Israeli pᴀssengers might be the beginning of a horrifying new terrorist tactic of recruiting and radicalizing real pilots to do 9/11-style attacks, a former IDF colonel and veteran intelligence officer warns.
“An individual doesn’t get the idea on his own to crash a plane full of people including himself. Somebody told him that if you do that you get your 72 virgins,” Miri Eisin, now an Israeli government spokesman, told The Post.
“If you think back to past plane hijackings, including 9/11, the hijacker was never the pilot of the plane. . . . This could be a new kind of suicide bomber,” she said.
Eisin, who served in the Israel Defense Forces as an intelligence officer for over 20 years, said she immediately suspected Iran’s hand in the near-tragic FlyDubai hijacking — though she was careful to stress she has no direct evidence and that the investigation is ongoing.
She said that the Omani pilot who stabbed his Indian co-pilot and attempted to crash the plane full of 174 pᴀssengers before he was overpowered by heroic Israeli pᴀssengers could have been radicalized by the Islamic Republic or its terrorist proxies.
President Trump has also suggested Iran might have been involved, but did not elaborate.
The pilot has been identified by The Wall Street Journal as an Omani national named Hamam al-Hammami. He had previously been banned from flying by Oman due to suspicions he had become radicalized, according to the publication.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the attacker had been subject to “Islamic radicalization.”
“This to me is very much something that could have come from Hezbollah or the IRGC Quds Force, this is the kind of things that they think of,” she said.
Eisin said that Iran, if responsible for the attack, may be trying to unleash a new kind of suicide bomber by infiltrating airlines with radicalized pilots who could launch an attack at any time.
Eisin said a pilot’s professional training would not make him immune to extremist indoctrination.
“Just because someone’s a pilot doesn’t mean they can’t be radicalized, people from all walks of life could be radicalized. [Syrian dictator] Bashar al-ᴀssad was a doctor, Josef Mengele was a doctor,” she said.
“And if you kill Israelis, the whole world applauds you,” she added.
Oded Ailam, a former deputy head of global operations for Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said recruiting a commercial pilot to deliberately crash a plane would require a far more elaborate process than persuading a young suicide bomber to carry out an attack.
“Recruiting and convincing a pilot to do something like that, it’s not the same as telling a 15-year-old to strap on a bomb and walk into a promenade and explode himself. This is a very sophisticated and long operation,” he said.
Ailam, who is now a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, said that it’s likely that Iran was able to radicalize the pilot pᴀssively without formally recruiting him via its vast array of anti-Israel propaganda online and in other venues.
“The lone wolf is influenced by the pack of wolves around him, he’s influenced by jihadists, by extremists in mosques, he’s influenced by prominent Iranians calling for death to Israel,” he said.
Ailam said that the prospect of lone wolf extremists could pose an even more dangerous threat to air travel than organized terror cells that could be identified and disrupted.
“Terror combined with mental disturbances in the pilot, when you combine it together the outcome is horrific. There are a lot of people who are being radicalized who are airline pilots,” he said.
Ailam said the flydubai attack will likely lead governments to rethink their post-9/11 security measures, and he predicts airlines will soon have to install technology that lets crew access the cockpit in the case of a copycat attack.
“It’s impossible to screen every pilot, the answer will have to be technological,” he said.
💔 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.
