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.