Israel came terrifyingly close to a mass-casualty aviation attack that could have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, and severed the country’s principal air connection with the outside world. This is according to new intelligence from the interrogation of the Omani co-pilot who hijacked his own flight to Tel Aviv.
The news of Flydubai flight 1073’s miraculous escape from disaster thanks to its heroic Israeli passenger and crew members has been well documented. It was carrying almost 180 people, including 27 children, when its Omani co-pilot, Hammam al-Hammami, attacked Captain Smit Machchar in the cockpit and attempted to seize control of the aircraft. What is now emerging from the investigation makes the episode considerably darker. According to reports of his confession under interrogation, Hammami had been preparing for this act long before he joined Flydubai.
Hammami is reported to have confessed that he had researched airlines flying to Tel Aviv and applied to several of them. He took the Flydubai job with Israel already in mind. During repeated flights between Dubai and Tel Aviv, he gathered information. He had considered carrying out the attack before and, according to interrogation accounts, abandoned or postponed previous opportunities because on one he had a friendship with a crew member he would have been murdering, and on another he had a crisis of confidence.
The failure of this attack should give us very little reason to relax
But now we know the target was also larger than the aircraft itself. Hammami reportedly told investigators that after killing the captain, he had intended to continue towards Israel as though making a normal landing approach, then divert at the last possible moment and crash into Ben Gurion airport. He also considered high-rise buildings in Tel Aviv. His calculation was straightforward and chilling: get close enough before revealing his intention that Israeli fighter aircraft would have no time to intervene.
That explains why Hammami did not attack at the beginning of the flight. He struck when the aircraft was already over Jordan, much closer to Israel, when the distance between an apparently routine approach and catastrophe had narrowed dramatically.
Ben Gurion would have been a target with consequences far beyond the immediate massive death toll. A passenger aircraft driven into a crowded terminal during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot could have killed people in the air and on the ground on a scale Israel has rarely experienced. The flight was due to arrive at around 9:30 a.m., during one of the busiest travel periods of the year. Tens of thousands of people could have been passing through the airport complex.
Then there is the wider purpose. Ben Gurion is Israel’s principal physical connection with the world. It carries Israelis, tourists, diplomats, businesspeople, foreign workers, families and freight. A successful attack would have hit far more than a building. Airlines would have reconsidered flying to Israel. Insurers would have reassessed risk. Tourism, already badly damaged after years of war, could have collapsed further. The practical and psychological isolation of the country would have deepened immediately.
Israeli journalist Amit Segal draws attention to precisely this danger. Even the earlier understanding of the attack, when it was thought Hammami intended to bring the aircraft down elsewhere, would have made it one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in Israeli history. A successful strike on Ben Gurion would have done something still more serious. It could have ended the air corridor between Israel and the Gulf, damaged one of the most visible achievements of the Abraham Accords and left foreign carriers asking whether they could safely serve Israel at all.
The Indian pilot, Captain Machchar, gave his account of what happened in the cockpit directly to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. It gives the story its human dimension. Captain Machchar noted that Hammami said he wanted to pray in the cockpit – apparently not an unusual occurrence. Machchar thought nothing much of it, and out of respect, he looked forward rather than towards his co-pilot to give him privacy as he communed with his god.
Minutes later, Hammami struck him from behind – we now know with the escape axe kept in the cockpit as standard. Machchar initially thought something catastrophic had happened to the aircraft. But the blows continued. His vision became almost useless. The plane began descending sharply. He found himself on the cockpit floor, hearing the rush of the aircraft and the screams of passengers outside.
The details are telling. Hammami prayed, then began his attack. This attack is a definite part of a pattern in which Islamist extremists have fused religious conviction with the deliberate murder of civilians. The ideology has a name. Its adherents have repeatedly told us what they believe, whom they consider enemies and what forms of violence they consider permissible.
Machchar, meanwhile, had no luxury of ideology or analysis. He understood that if he could not open the cockpit door, everybody would die. Badly injured, with his memory fragmented and his vision blurred, he found what he described as ‘one last fight’. The crew outside had been trying to gain access using the cockpit code (though the Israelis on board have said in interviews they did not know whether to trust the crew and were later assigned to shadow their every move until landing), while Hammami prevented the door from opening. Machchar forced himself towards the manual mechanism, reached the knob and twisted it. The door opened.
People outside were ready. That act may have saved nearly 180 people on the aircraft. If Hammami’s reported confession is accurate, it may also have saved hundreds or thousands more at Ben Gurion. And even before the full facts were known, another ugliness appeared.
Across social media, conspiracy theories began circulating that Israel itself had somehow staged the attack against its own citizens, supposedly as some demented attempt to win international sympathy. I have seen too many journalistic ‘analyses’ about how Benjamin Netanyahu gains from this in the upcoming Israeli elections. This sick reflex is now grotesquely familiar. Israelis are attacked, and before the evidence has even settled, people begin searching for a way to make Israel responsible for the attack upon itself, or to make it a political ploy by their favourite villain. It is a madness which has poisoned too many minds.
There is a reason they do it. Try to turn every atrocity into a conspiracy and no perpetrator ever has to be confronted. Evidence becomes deception and victims become suspects. The ideology that produced the violence disappears behind a fog of insinuation.
The failure of this attack should therefore give us very little reason to relax. Its failure was the result of courage, physical resistance and a determination to protect human life – generally speaking, all things highly valued in Israeli society and by Jewish thinking and belief. Captain Machchar fought while injured and half-blinded. Others were waiting outside the cockpit door to act the moment he opened it. Their bravery changed the ending. But it did not change what was intended.
There remains an extremist Islamist movement around the world, appearing through different organisations, networks and individuals, which directs violence towards Jews, Israelis and Western societies. It has done so for decades. Its methods vary: aircraft, bombs, guns, knives, vehicles, hostages. The essential idea survives every change in method: civilian life may be destroyed in pursuit of an extremist Islamic ideological and religious objective.
Israel almost experienced its own 9/11. It was only prevented because people fought back. The plot, the planning, the target and the ideology behind it remain. The fact that it didn’t succeed changes little about the religion, ideology, identity, movement and extremity which try daily to make these horrors happen to Jews, Israelis, the West. We are at war. If you don’t know it, you should.
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