Investigators say the co-pilot who attacked Flight FZ1073 on September 30 had already lined up the same plan months earlier and walked away only because someone he knew was in the cabin.
A July attempt he called off
People briefed on the investigation told The Wall Street Journal that Hamam al-Hammami, the Omani first officer, had sought airlines and routes into Israel. He told interrogators he had nearly carried out an attack on an earlier Dubai–Tel Aviv flight in July, then reconsidered. Israeli officials say he dropped that attempt because of a personal connection with a crew member. He had flown the route as early as June. By his own account, he used those trips to study Ben Gurion.
He chose the airline for the route
Al-Hammami joined flydubai in February after Oman Air barred him from flying over extremist views. Royal Air Maroc had already turned him down. The Journal reported that flydubai ran a criminal-background check but never contacted Oman about the grounding. Israeli officials say he told UAE interrogators the plot predates the job. He looked for carriers flying to Tel Aviv, applied widely, and picked flydubai for the route. “I planned the operation even before I was hired,” he told investigators, in an account Channel 13 reported.
This was not a spontaneous cockpit fight. He meant to incapacitate the captain, hold a normal profile long enough for landing clearance, and then drive the Boeing 737 into Ben Gurion or a nearby tower. Ynet, citing the probe, also reported a fallback: a crash into a U.S. installation in Jordan if he could not reach Israel. He cited revenge over the Gaza war as his motive. Jerusalem’s working assessment is that he acted alone. Shin Bet officers are in the Emirates for the interrogation. Investigators have ruled out the cabin crew. They are still checking his travel to states Israel treats as hostile, including a long stay in Syria, plus his student years in Australia and New Zealand.
What the first report could not yet say
UAE prosecutors have called the September 30 assault a terrorist act. Al-Hammami used an emergency crash axe, not merely a blade, on Indian captain Smit Machchhar. The wounded captain opened the door. Passengers and off-duty pilots stopped the dive and landed at Tabuk. iResearch Weekly reported that sequence the night it happened. Reporters did not yet know the same man had already stood at the edge of the identical attack and stepped back.
A gap that was already on paper
The larger failure is now on the record. A 2024 state comptroller audit warned that Israel had split responsibility for foreign aircraft entering its airspace, and that the rules were outdated. Netanyahu later assigned foreign-flight security to the Transportation Ministry. Army Radio reported an internal National Security Council document on what followed. The ministry did not once ask the Shin Bet or Mossad for help vetting foreign crews. Israeli rules were also supposed to keep pilots from states without diplomatic relations — Oman among them — off Israel-bound decks. Al-Hammami flew the route anyway.
Netanyahu has called it a loophole and ordered an internal review. Times of Israel editor David Horovitz has drawn the harder parallel: as with October 7, an obvious threat sat in plain sight, and no one in authority is owning the miss. This latest attempt to kill Israeli civilians shows the same kind of gap in the nation’s security protocol. Israel has to close it. Until inbound foreign crews get the same vetting as outbound Israeli flights, the heroism that saved FZ1073 remains the safety system.
