A dramatic hijacking foiled by the bravery of everyday Israelis

ITS NOON IN ISRAEL
The Morning After the Miracle: With a terrorist hijacking averted, what now awaits Israel and the region?
Amit Segal and Ari Tatarka
October 1, 2026

It’s Thursday, October 1, and Israeli social media is awash in a torrent of celebration, praise and gallows humor following yesterday’s miraculous foiling of a terrorist hijacking on FlyDubai flight FZ1073. By every reasonable expectation, the country should have woken this morning to grief: to names and faces, and to the long, familiar litany of condolence. Instead, it woke to memes. It is a sad reality that for Israelis this is the best of all possible worlds: not safety, but that those who try to kill us fail. Beneath all the celebrations, that is the grim truth engraved anew on every Israeli heart…In recent weeks—largely unnoticed, at the bottom of the news—there was a major dispute between Shin Bet Director David Zini and Israel’s airlines over a ban the Shin Bet had imposed on flights to the UAE. The agency’s reasoning was straightforward: it considered security measures at Emirati airports insufficient, and refused to resume flights. The security measures in place for flights to Israel could plausibly have helped prevent this attack, especially given that the terrorist appears to have brought a weapon on board on his person. READ MORE

NEW YORK POST Israel-bound plane pilot stabbed by co-pilot, causing jet to plunge 18K feet: They ‘tried to do 9/11’ The pilot of a passenger plane flying to Israel was stabbed several times by his co-pilot in the cockpit early Wednesday, according to officials — causing the aircraft to plunge 18,000 feet in what was feared to be a “terrorist attack in mid-air.” The FlyDubai Boeing 737 Max 8 plane flying to Tel Aviv from the United Arab Emirates was cruising at around 34,000 feet when one of the pilots tried to take control in what Israeli sources say was an attempted hijacking, the Jerusalem Post reported. “One pilot stabbed the other and tried to do 9/11,” an official told Channel 12 of the horror that saw Israeli fighter jets scrambled as a precaution.

FREE PRESS ‘I Ran Toward the Cockpit’: An Exclusive Interview with the Israeli Dad Who Stopped a Hijacking Yaniv Hayoun was on a flight from Dubai to Israel with his family when one of the co-pilots stabbed the other and sent the plane into a nosedive. He told The Free Press what happened next.

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“Wounded captain filmed explaining how he can no longer squeeze his hand shut after copilot ‘hit me so many times’; footage also shows passengers and crew keeping eye on bound assailant”

TIMES OF ISRAEL
‘Is there a doctor or pilot?’: New video shows chaos on flydubai flight after attack thwarted
October 2, 2026

New footage aired Thursday by Israeli television showed the chaotic moments aboard flydubai Flight 1073 after passengers and crew members thwarted an apparent attempt to crash the plane flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv. In a video clip shared by Channel 12 news, which was filmed from a seat near the cockpit, people shout in a mixture of English and Hebrew, with one person saying “he tried to crash the plane,” in reference to the Omani copilot who stabbed the plane’s Indian captain. Others yell “take him out” in the direction of the cockpit and order people in the cabin to “sit down.”…According to Hayun, the Israeli who steadied the plane, the copilot called out, “Kill me,” after being tied up. In a clip released by the Government Press Office, Musayev described how the Israelis initially used headphone wire to tie up the copilot, “to ensure that he could not start to go wild.” READ MORE

JPOST ‘The cockpit was empty’: Israeli recounts fight to survive flydubai attempted hijacking During the confrontation aboard the Dubai-to-Tel Aviv flight on Wednesday, he said, there had been an interval when nobody was inside it. He understood that the two pilots traveling among the passengers had to take over. “I had to shake them to get them to move to the front and take control of the plane, because it was diving,” he had told The Jerusalem Post in our initial exchange…Tal described several things happening at once. Passengers were trying to overcome the attacker. The injured pilot needed help. The additional pilots had remained in the cabin and, in his description, appeared frozen. He shouted for them to move forward and take control. He then had to shake them, he said. One ultimately took control of the aircraft; the other took longer to recover from the shock.

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CAMERA: “The minimized and sanitized reporting on the terrifying, bloody, near-fatal attack of the Dubai-Tel Aviv FlyDubai flight serves as a stark case study in the modern news ecosystem”

CAMERA
When Media Call a Cockpit Stabbing, Hijacking Distress Signal and Nosedive a Pilot ‘Clash,’ ‘Fight’ or ‘Brawl
Jennifer Kouzi
September 30, 2026

…While western media outlets have been notably allergic to ascribe the word “terror” and its derivatives to a person or act, or avoid it totally, there is little explanation, even in the earliest reports, of calling the stabbing of a copilot and the nosedive thereafter a “clash,” “altercation,” “cockpit incident,” “brawl,” or “fight” between the pilots in their headlines. In addition, many outlets omitted the stabbing altogether, leaving the reason for the diverted flight a mystery…The BBC initially characterized the incident as a “fight between pilots” and framed the news around “far right” Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. (In what appears to be an act of the network’s fixation with the minister, it also called Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport “Ben Gvir Airport” in the midst of reporting.) As to the facts reported by eyewitnesses on the plane, the BBC characterized it as what “passengers [told] Israeli media,” but made sure to alert its audience to the fact that it could not verify the accounts. READ MORE

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“No other nation, isolated, boycotted, and surrounded by enemies devoted to death, would reaffirm its determination to live by bringing yet more children into this world, expanding its economy, and reasserting its technological prowess”

CLARITY
The Meaning of FZ1073
Michael Oren
October 1, 2026

Occurring just over a week before the anniversary of the October 7 horrors, the saving of FlyDubai Flight 1073 from fiery destruction and 174 passengers, most of them Israelis, from certain death, stands as a metaphor for the past three years of war. Starting at 6:29 on the morning of October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists breached the Gaza fence at dozens of locations and invaded Israeli border communities. More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign workers were slaughtered and 251 taken hostage. The next day, Hezbollah joined the fight, attacking northern Israeli towns with rockets and drones. Further strikes were aimed at Israel from Iranian-backed terrorists in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, as well as from the Islamic Republic itself. Another country—Britain, for example, or the Netherlands—having suffered similar losses, would have taken weeks or months to mount even a minor military response, if any. Hundreds of thousands of their citizens would not have rallied to their nation’s defense, put on uniforms and picked up guns and risked their lives, often in hundreds of days of relentless urban combat.  READ MORE

JNS Melanie Phillips: Those amazing and heroic Israelis On Monday, Britain’s foreign secretary Ed Miliband delivered a diatribe against Israel, accusing it of ethnic cleansing and war crimes, and vowing to punish it for the crime of allowing Jews to “settle” in their own historic land. On Wednesday, four ordinary Israelis on a flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv averted a new 9/11 by overpowering the co-pilot who was attempting to crash the plane, possibly in Israel. There could hardly be a better illustration of the way Britain is now choosing to embrace a culture of death while Israel is choosing life…An averted catastrophe in the air shows how the Jewish state chooses life, while Britain and the West are embracing a culture of death.

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“When I tell you Israelis are incandescent with rage, it is not an exaggeration. Israelis want Avraham and Szor to lose their citizenship”

ISRAEL WAR DIARY
Absolutely nothing — no insult, no blood libel, no calumny —has enraged Israelis more than Yuval Avraham and Rachel Szor, Israeli creators of the vicious, calculated piece of propaganda against the IDF entitled “Naza”
Naomi Ragen
September 27, 2026

We in Israel are once again fast approaching another anniversary of October 7. I won’t lie. These years, all three of them, have been filled with unbelievable pain; with vicious, hateful insults towards the  Jews, and the people of Israel. We have heard ourselves described as baby-killers, although it was our babies that were deliberately killed. We have been accused of genocide, when it was Hamas whose entire intention on October 7 was exactly that. But nothing, absolutely nothing — no insult, no blood libel, no calumny —has enraged Israelis more than Yuval Avraham and Rachel Szor, Israeli creators of the vicious, calculated piece of propaganda against the IDF entitled “Naza.” The disgust and outrage I have witnessed spreading across Israel has been unlike anything else. It has flooded across barriers of political and religious divides, doing something we’ve long believed impossible: creating total unity among all Israelis. READ MORE

YNET ‘We don’t care’: Dutch audience heckles Oct. 7 bereaved mother at NAZA screening
A screening of the documentary NAZA in the Netherlands erupted into confrontation after bereaved Israeli mother Sabine Tassa took the stage and protested the film’s portrayal of the war, declaring: “Hamas terrorists murdered my husband and son.” Several members of the audience responded by shouting “Shame on you” and “We don’t care…Tassa, whose husband and son were murdered in the Oct. 7 massacre and whose other children were seriously wounded, then took the stage and addressed the film’s directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who were not present at the event. “Look me in the eyes. You talk about collateral damage? My husband and my son were murdered by Hamas. Where is that in your film?” she said.

ALGEMEINER IDF Reveals 170 Gaza ‘Journalists’ Were Terror Operatives, Escalating Scrutiny of Wartime Media Death Toll The Israeli military revealed Thursday that 170 Palestinians killed in Gaza who were publicly identified as civilian “journalists” were actually affiliated with terrorist organizations, further intensifying scrutiny of international accusations that Israel deliberately targets members of the press. In a months-long investigation, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) identified dozens of individuals presented as journalists and media personnel who were in fact serving within terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip, including 118 members of Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, 49 members of Islamic Jihad, two members of the Popular Resistance Committees and one member of the Mujahideen Brigades. According to compiled documents, 17 individuals on the list even took part in the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

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“How the Meaning of One Family’s Rescue Evolved Across Two Generations, Four Texts, and Fifty Years”

TABLET MAG
Remembering Entebbe
Menachem Butler
September 27, 2026

“Is he a real malach [angel], or did Hashem send some real soldiers?” That’s what Renee Karfunkel asked her husband, George, shortly after midnight on July 4, 1976. Israeli transport aircraft had just landed at Entebbe, nearly 2,500 miles from Israel, and commandos had burst into the old terminal. One of them, carrying two weapons and wearing a yarmulke, called out in Hebrew, “Shavuah Tov, we came to take you home.” Renee’s question did not distinguish between divine deliverance and military action. It asked what kind of messenger Hashem had sent. For nearly a week, George and Renee Karfunkel had been prisoners in the terminal. After a stopover in Athens, their Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris had been hijacked by two Palestinian and two German terrorists, then diverted first to Libya and finally to Uganda. At Entebbe, the hijackers separated the Jewish and Israeli passengers from the others. Most of the others were eventually released. The Karfunkels remained. Their passports identified them as Americans, but their captors held them as Jews. READ MORE

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The 1913 Jean Metzinger painting will return to the family of late art collector Emanuel Lewenstein, whose family was persecuted after Nazis took control of the Netherlands — and looted the work

CHICAGO SUN TIMES
Art Institute of Chicago to return looted Holocaust-era painting to family of persecuted art collector
Ambar Colón
September 22, 2026

The Art Institute of Chicago is returning the Cubist painting “Woman with a Fan” by French artist Jean Metzinger to the Lewenstein family, the institution announced Tuesday. The oil painting from 1913 was lost during a forced Nazi-era sale in the Netherlands. However, there were significant gaps in the painting’s historical record, said Jacques Schuhmacher, the museum’s executive director of provenance. The work resurfaced on the Dutch art market in the 1950s, moved through galleries in Paris and New York City, and was later acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1959, when Mr. and Mrs. Sigmund Kunstadter donated the work to the Chicago museum. READ MORE

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“Democrats do not have to indulge the left-wing streamer’s failure to grasp the distinctions between America and al-Qaeda. Their willingness to keep putting up with him is its own failure”

FREE PRESS
The Moral Illiteracy of Hasan Piker
Eli Lake
September 18, 2026

Is America really worse than al-Qaeda? It’s hard to imagine that any serious person could answer yes. But that is the sincere view of Hasan Piker, the wildly popular left-wing Twitch streamer who has been elevated by many Democrats and progressives during the 2026 midterm elections as a way to attract Gen Z men. “Pound for pound, as far as the number of deaths, yes,” said Piker in response to Axios reporter Alex Thompson in an interview clip released Thursday. Piker went on to claim that America sows terror all over the world. For example, during the opening strikes of the Iran war in February, a U.S.-made Tomahawk missile hit an Iranian girls’ school in Minab, collapsing a main building. “If you’re killing 140 schoolgirls, that is an act of terror,” Piker added in the Axios interview. This is the kind of sophistry that passes for sophistication in a streamer’s comment section. In national politics though, such claims should be self-discrediting. READ MORE

NY POST Crowd sings ‘from the river to the sea’ at AOC’s college student event promoting Dems ahead of midterms It’s socialist red at Big Red! Cornell University’s lefty crowd gave Democratic Socialist superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a warm, hate-filled welcome by singing anti-Israel chants at a campaign event meant to gin up support for Democrats ahead of the midterms Sunday. While warming up the standing-room-only crowd of roughly 2,000 people gathered for the congresswoman’s “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall in downtown Ithaca Sunday, Cornell University Young Democratic Socialists of America co-chairs Mina Petrova and Zoe Reisman led the crowd singing “from the river to the sea” and declaring “long live the student intifada.”

FREE BEACON NYC’s First Lady Is ‘In Residence’ at Israel-Hating Islamic Wellness Retreat in Portuguese Castle: Organizers Called for Abolishing Israel, ‘Cleansing’ It of Jews Eat, pray, bomb. New York City’s first lady is currently wrapping up a week as an “artist-in-residence” at a luxury Islamic wellness retreat that has called for the destruction of Israel and openly celebrated Palestinian terrorism, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal. While Rama Duwaji went from the river to the spa, her husband rolled out his own “strategy to combat antisemitism”—a move widely panned by Jewish New Yorkers. The event in an 18th-century palace owned by a ‘death doula’ costs $5,216 for five nights in a private, single room. 

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The Palestinian Rachel Doleza: Hannah Gann, a local pro-Palestinian activist, said she “outright lied about my background”

PITTSBURGH JEWISH CHRONICLE
A Jewish teacher in Philadelphia pretended to be Palestinian for years
Andrew Lapin
September 24, 2026

A Jewish public school teacher and pro-Palestinian advocate in Philadelphia has admitted to fabricating Palestinian, Tunisian and Black heritage to her colleagues for years, in a case that some online commenters are dubbing “the Palestinian Rachel Dolezal.” Hannah Gann posted confessions and apologies to social media this week, following confrontations from local pro-Palestinian groups she had worked with. In her apologies, she identified herself as “a white woman with significant privilege and wealth” who has “no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage.”…Neither of Gann’s visible social media apologies mentioned Jewish heritage. But the Philadelphia Inquirer, citing internal documents from the activist groups, reported that she had identified herself in college as a “Jewish woman with family in the occupied West Bank.” READ MORE

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EVENT: Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema comes to Highand Park, October 8-18, 2026

Welcome to 2026 Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema

We’re doing something different this year. Our exciting LIVE AND IN-PERSON Festival will take place at the Wayfarer Theaters in Highland Park October 8-18. Followling that, most of our films—the exception is the ultra-new Our Loves—will be streamed October 19-25* only. We did this, knowing some of you are unable to attend the LIVE Festival for various reasons, but IF IT IS AT ALL POSSIBLE, we encourage you to see our films the way the filmmakers intended: on the Big Screen, in the arms of a community that loves and supports you.

Schedule of screenings

To purchase tickets

To purchase screening passes

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