Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a pilot stabbed another pilot and then apparently tried to crash into a plane carrying dozens of Israelis on Wednesday. Passengers and crew members made a dramatic intervention to subdue the attacker, and the plane eventually made an emergency landing in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
A Flydubai flight from the United Arab Emirates to Israel landed safely after an emergency alert was issued and suddenly descended thousands of feet. But the incident prompted Israel to send in warplanes because it raised concerns about the possibility of the plane being hijacked.
Netanyahu said that Saudi Arabia arrested the pilot of the flight.
Video footage circulating on social media, and seen by the Associated Press, shows two men on the floor of the plane with bloody injuries. Two people appear to be providing emergency medical treatment, while two others are guarding the cockpit. “We are guarding the pilot,” one person said in Hebrew. In another video, passengers are seen crying and screaming in distress as the plane shakes.
The plane’s pilot and first officer were injured and taken to hospital, according to a statement issued by Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Airport in Tabuk and reported by the Saudi Al-Ekhbariya channel. The passengers were receiving medical care from local authorities, according to a regional official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to inform the media.
Netanyahu has warned in recent days of increasing, unspecified security threats. Days away from commemorating the Hamas militant attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which sparked a series of wars, and weeks away from holding elections.
The pilots quarreled, and the passengers and crew mediated
About two and a half hours after leaving Dubai, the flight descended from an altitude of 33,000 feet to 17,000 feet (about 10,000 meters to 5,100 metres) in about a minute, before making an erratic circuit near the Jordanian border and eventually landing in Tabuk about an hour later, according to Flightradar24.
Netanyahu said, citing the passenger he spoke to, that when the plane began to land, a passenger and a crew member managed to break into the cockpit. Other crew members then took control of the aircraft.
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Netanyahu said: “I salute these heroes who showed exceptional resourcefulness and courage. They saved many lives and prevented a major catastrophe.”
Earlier, an official confirmed that Israel sent warplanes for fear of being kidnapped. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident is under investigation.
In recent days, Netanyahu has warned of escalating and unspecified security threats. The country is days away from commemorating the October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, weeks away from holding elections, and has been embroiled in multiple conflicts in the past three years.
The passengers screamed when they heard fighting
Yasmine Abu Qassis, whose daughter was on the plane, said that her daughter told her in a phone call that she heard someone screaming “Help!”
Abu Qassis added that her daughter said that the plane began to lose control, causing the passengers to scream in fear. She said that two people – who she said were pilots – were eventually able to seize control of the plane, while other people tried to subdue an attacker on the floor of the plane.
Passengers told Israel’s Channel 12 by phone that they also heard screaming from those sitting near the front of the plane who heard a quarrel between the pilots, and the plane made a sharp decline before landing in Saudi Arabia.
Tabuk Airport reported that a Flydubai flight made a distress call at 8:44 am local time, before landing safely at 9:45 am local time.
Flydubai confirmed that flight FZ 1073 bound for Ben Gurion Airport was involved in an accident and landed in Tabuk on Wednesday.
“Our teams are working closely with the relevant authorities,” the company said.
Israelis were targeted in a series of kidnappings and plane attacks by Palestinian militants in the 1960s and 1970s. Israel has not seen a hijacking in decades, but maintains some of the strictest security measures at airports in the world, including for flights to Israel.
The emergency landing in Saudi Arabia was not the first for a plane carrying Israelis home. The kingdom does not have formal diplomatic relations with Israel, but ended its long-standing ban on Israeli flights flying over its territory in 2022. Since then, Saudi Arabia has coordinated several emergency landings for Israeli passengers, including in 2023 when a plane experienced an electrical malfunction.
The UAE has become a popular holiday destination for Israeli tourists since the normalization of relations between the two countries in 2020. Flydubai is the low-cost sister airline of Emirates.
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