Flydubai co-pilot planned July attack on Israeli flight, investigators reveal

On a Wednesday afternoon, a flydubai flight carrying more than 180 passengers—nearly all of them Israeli—lifted off from Dubai bound for Tel Aviv. Two hours and twenty minutes into the flight, the co-pilot, a 29-year-old Omani national named Hamam al-Hammami, rose from his seat to pray. When he returned to the cockpit, he attacked the captain with an emergency crash axe kept there for safety purposes.

Captain Smit Machchhar felt what he later described as a "big blow" to the back of his head. The strikes continued. In a phone call with Israel's prime minister the following day, Machchhar recounted the moment of realization: "The blows kept coming. That's when I realised that it's not the aircraft, it's the other guy who was in the cockpit with me." Despite his injuries, Machchhar managed to unlock the cockpit door, allowing passengers to rush in and overpower al-Hammami. A reserve pilot traveling as a passenger took control of the aircraft and diverted it to a regional airport in northwestern Saudi Arabia, where al-Hammami was detained by Saudi authorities.

What investigators have uncovered since suggests this attack was not a sudden act of rage but the culmination of months of planning. Police and security agencies across at least six countries are now working to reconstruct al-Hammami's background and intentions. According to regional and Israeli officials, al-Hammami originally planned to carry out his attack in July but postponed it—possibly, investigators believe, because a friend was among the crew on that earlier date. The postponement points to something more deliberate still: evidence suggests al-Hammami may have specifically sought employment with an airline that flew to Israel in order to execute this attack.

Al-Hammami's employment history reveals a pattern of concern. He worked for Oman Air from 2018 until June 2025, when he was moved to a desk job after the airline became worried about his extremist views. He then took a position with Royal Air Maroc, Morocco's national carrier, but never obtained permission to fly and abandoned the job. Shortly after, he was hired by flydubai, a state-owned airline expanding its pilot workforce. The airline conducted background checks for criminal records but not for signs of radicalization, officials confirmed.

According to Israeli media reports of al-Hammami's statements to interrogators, he planned to crash the plane into Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv or possibly another high-profile target in the area. Nine hours after the attack, posts appeared on a social media account in his name praising Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former al-Qaeda leader, and a militant responsible for a lethal suicide bombing against U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2009. An analysis of al-Hammami's deleted X account, recovered through internet archives and reviewed by the firm Accountability!, found nearly 3,000 posts and responses containing dozens of misogynistic messages, repeated use of slurs against women, and homophobic language. The analysis surfaced what researchers described as "explicit conditional threats of physical violence," including repeated imagery of violence against women. "Online toxicity isn't just corrosive, it's a warning sign," said Gur Megiddo, the firm's chief executive. "This pilot was telling the world who he was in his posts. Had anyone in charge been listening, nearly 200 people might never have been put in danger."

The incident has exposed what Israeli officials now acknowledge are significant gaps in security oversight. Israeli newspapers reported that a key database of foreign pilots had not been checked despite prior warnings from official reports. A dispute has emerged between Israel's transportation ministry and the Shin Bet, the country's domestic security agency, over who was responsible for vetting passenger lists from foreign flights. Transportation Minister Miri Regev claimed security agencies handled flight security; the Shin Bet said the transportation ministry was responsible for passenger vetting.

The timing of the attack—one week before the anniversary of the October 7 Hamas assault that triggered the war in Gaza, and weeks before a contested general election—has made it a flashpoint in Israeli politics. Opposition politicians have seized on the apparent security failures to challenge Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has made his ability to keep Israelis safe a cornerstone of his political brand. "This is exactly what system collapse looks like," wrote Yair Golan, head of the opposition Democrats party. "A transportation minister who completely abandons our skies, and a prime minister who abandons national security."

Investigators are still working to establish whether al-Hammami acted entirely alone and when his radicalization began. The investigation has expanded to at least eight countries, including New Zealand and Australia, where al-Hammami studied about a decade ago. The question of how a man with documented extremist concerns and a trail of violent rhetoric on social media was able to gain employment as a pilot at a major airline—and board a flight full of Israeli passengers—remains at the center of the inquiry.