The captain said yes.
That’s how it began, according to Capt. Smit Machchhar. Speaking by phone with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday, the Indian pilot said his first officer asked to pray shortly before the attack on Wednesday’s Dubai–Tel Aviv flight.
Four or five minutes later, Machchhar said, something slammed into the back of his head. He thought the plane had broken apart.
“But then, after that, the blows kept coming, one after the other,” he said. “That’s when I realized that it’s not the aircraft, it’s the other guy who was in the cockpit with me.”
Netanyahu has said the attacker “underwent Islamist radical indoctrination.”
What happened
UAE Prosecutor General Hamad Saif al-Shamsi said Saturday that the co-pilot “attempted to carry out a terrorist act.” According to the state news agency WAM, he said the co-pilot attacked the captain with the cockpit’s emergency crash axe and tried to seize the controls. That much is confirmed.
The UAE has not officially named the terrorist, but ABC News and Israeli media, citing various sources, identify him as Hamam al-Hammami, a 29-year-old Omani national. ABC also reports, citing sources briefed on the investigation, that he is cooperating and has said he meant to crash the plane in Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation with the Indian pilot from the flight from Dubai, Captain Smit Machchhar:
“You are a hero for Israel, India, and the entire world. I invite Prime Minister @NarendraModi and you to light a flame on Israeli Independence Day.” 🇮🇱🇮🇳During the emotional conversation that took place this evening, the Prime Minister asked Captain Machchhar how it all started, and Machchhar revealed new details about the terrifying moments in the cockpit.
— Prime Minister of Israel (@IsraeliPM) October 3, 2026
Machchhar said al-Hammami kept crew members outside from entering the cockpit door code. The door opens from the inside with a twist of the handle. Bleeding and barely able to see, the captain managed one “short, quick twist.”
Passengers rushed in. Yaniv Hayun, an Israeli plumber, told Channel 12 he found the attacker kneeling on the controls, trying to smash equipment. Hayun grabbed him by the neck and steadied the plane until an off-duty pilot on board took over. The flight landed in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.
See related: A Sukkot miracle at 33,000 feet
He was flagged. Twice.
Al-Hammami was not an unknown quantity.
ABC News reports, citing senior intelligence and law enforcement officials, that Oman Air found him with extremist materials in 2024 while he was a co-pilot trainee. The airline took him off flying duties and kept him in an administrative job.
Royal Air Maroc told ABC that he completed three months of theoretical training with it in 2025 and was not hired. It would not say why.
So two airlines passed on him. Then a Dubai airline hired him and put him in the right-hand seat on a flight full of Israelis. According to ABC, investigators still don’t know how that happened. That is the first screening failure, and it happened in the UAE.
His nationality alone shouldn’t shock anyone. Oman has no formal relations with Israel, but the two countries have dealt quietly for decades. A former Mossad director said he first visited the sultanate in 1974. Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Benjamin Netanyahu all went there as prime minister. In October 2018, Netanyahu and his wife Sara flew to Muscat at Sultan Qaboos’s invitation, the first visit by an Israeli leader in more than two decades.
Those ties have cooled since then. Following Qaboos’s death in 2020, Oman’s parliament voted to criminalize dealings with Israel. One analyst described the move as mainly an effort to appease Iran and predicted that relations would continue more quietly.
See related: Israel and the Sultan
An Omani in an Israel-bound cockpit is not, by itself, a red flag. But an Omani whose own national airline grounded him over jihadist views is.
Israeli regulations reportedly bar pilots from countries without diplomatic relations from flying into Israel. Channel 12 says the Abraham Accords framework with the UAE contains the same restriction. Yet the network reports that dozens of Omani pilots flew into Israel in recent years. According to Channel 12, Israel left enforcement to the airlines, and the Shin Bet never checked where Flydubai’s pilots came from.
Channel 12 also reports that Flydubai sent Israel the crew list ahead of Wednesday’s flight, as required, and that nothing raised concern. Unnamed security sources told the network that Israel had “not a scrap of information on him.”
Opposition parties are already campaigning on the failure ahead of Israel’s Oct. 27 election, blaming Netanyahu for yet another major security lapse that could have ended in catastrophe.
Three years on, the lesson still hasn’t reached the airport
This was terrorism, not a cockpit scuffle. The UAE, which had every reason to play it down, says so itself.
The warning signs were there. One airline pulled al-Hammimi from flying over Islamist material, and another declined to hire him. No one has said whether Oman Air’s findings were ever passed to Israel or any other foreign service. Either way, nobody went looking.
This is a recurring problem for Israel, punctuated by the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion. Channel 12 reported that a 2024 State Comptroller recommendation told the government to review security protocols across air travel. According to Haaretz, a law requiring airlines to send crew lists to Israeli security agencies passed more than three years ago.
Flydubai reportedly sent the list. The Transportation Ministry’s security division says it never received the names. Either way, nobody ran them.
That is Oct. 7 in miniature. Israel had the information it needed and failed to act on what was in front of it. The unnamed security sources who spoke to Channel 12 made the same comparison: before Oct. 7, they said, the facts were out in the open and nobody looked.
This Wednesday marks three years since that massacre, and clearly the lessons still have not been fully learned.
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