The facts
This is a same-day account. Nobody has published a finished investigation, a named suspect, or a weapon confirmed by an authority. Flydubai says the motive is unknown. What follows is what the prime minister, the airline, the trackers, and the passengers said on Sept. 30, 2026.
Flydubai flight FZ1073 was scheduled from Dubai International to Ben Gurion. Flightradar24 says it left Dubai at 03:05 UTC, which is 7:05 a.m. in Dubai and 6:05 a.m. in Israel and Saudi Arabia, and climbed to 34,000 feet. CNN's published timeline uses that 6:05 a.m. figure and calls it local time. The clocks only match if "local" means Israel and Saudi Arabia, which were three hours ahead of UTC that morning, not Dubai, which was four.
About two hours out, the jet came apart in the data. Flightradar24 says that at 05:21 UTC (8:21 a.m. in Saudi Arabia) it started a steep descent, then a sharp climb, then another steep descent. By 05:33 UTC it was centered near 15,000 feet, and after that the altitude kept oscillating and the ground speed kept changing. It was not one clean dive. That is why the headlines do not share a number. CNN said tracking data showed a drop of 17,400 feet in just under two minutes. Reuters said Flightradar24 data showed a plunge of nearly 14,000 feet in 30 seconds. The Associated Press said about 16,000 feet in about a minute, then an erratic circle near the Jordanian border. All three can be slices of the same ugly track. None of them is a final accident report.
The transponder told on itself. Flightradar24 says the crew squawked 7700, the international code for a general emergency, at 05:28:48 UTC, along the Saudi-Jordanian border. At 05:35 UTC it switched to 7500, the code for unlawful interference, the polite phrase for a hijacking, turned west, crossed briefly into Jordan, turned 180 degrees, and headed southwest for Tabuk. Approaching the airport it went back to 7700. CNN's timeline puts the 7700 at 8:31 a.m. and the 7500 at 8:35 a.m., then Jordan at 8:41 and Saudi airspace again at 8:46. The minutes differ by a little. The order is the same: emergency, then hijack code, then a U-turn away from Israel.
Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Airport in Tabuk, run for these purposes by Saudi operator Cluster2, said it received a distress request at 8:44 a.m. local, declared an emergency, and saw the airplane land safely a little more than an hour later. CNN's timeline puts the wheels on the ground at 9:54 a.m. Flightradar24's last ADS-B message was 06:58 UTC, 9:58 a.m. in Tabuk, and the tracker called that a safe landing. Some early writeups treated 8:44 as the landing time. The airport statement reads as the time it got the call, not the time the tires hit.
Cluster2 said both the captain and the first officer were injured and taken to the hospital. It did not say which one attacked the other. Passengers were looked after in the terminal. Flydubai's statement, posted in full by Flightradar24, said an altercation happened on the flight deck, the aircraft was "successfully secured by on-duty flydubai crew travelling on the flight," and those crew diverted it to Tabuk. "All passengers and crew are safe and accounted for." Two replacement airplanes were sent. The rest of the network was not affected. Then the line that should have slowed everybody down: "At this early stage, the underlying reasons and motives behind this event are unknown and remain subject to a formal investigation. We urge all parties to refrain from premature speculation while authorities gather the facts."
Benjamin Netanyahu did not refrain. In a video address he said: "During the flight as they approached the country, one of the pilots stabbed the other pilot. Apparently he tried to crash the plane with its occupants." He said he had spoken to one Israeli passenger. "He told me that the plane went into a spin and began to dive. He told me that somehow he managed to break into the cockpit with one of the crew members and together they neutralized the stabbing pilot while he was trying to sabotage the aircraft's systems." A second air crew already on the airplane got into the cockpit and stabilized it, he said. The attacker was arrested and is being interrogated by Saudi authorities. Netanyahu said Israel was in continuous contact to get the passengers home, and he called it a most serious security incident. He said "almost all" of the passengers were Israelis. The Associated Press reported his account as an arrest of the pilot who stabbed another and apparently tried to crash a plane full of Israelis, stopped by passengers and crew.
Israeli officials, speaking without their names, went further than the airline. Two of them told CNN the co-pilot was the attacker and that he is an Omani national. Oman and Israel do not have formal relations. The same officials said it was not yet clear whether the aim was to crash the jet or to land it and take hostages. A separate Israeli official told CNN that Shin Bet, Mossad, the military, and the transportation ministry are all on the case, and that a main question is how a pilot from a country with no diplomatic ties to Israel was cleared to fly into Tel Aviv. Reuters reported three Israeli officials calling the current assessment a possible attempted terror attack, not a mental-health crisis. One of them identified the attacker as Omani. Reuters said cabin crew entered the cockpit. Oman had not commented when Reuters asked. Netanyahu's office had not answered Reuters either. The Times of Israel reported the captain as an Emirati citizen and the co-pilot as an Omani who had worked at the airline for less than a year. That employment line is the paper's "reportedly," not a company biography. No authority has released the attacker's name. CNN's own list of unknowns still includes the name, the weapon, and the motive.
Passengers described a knife. Authorities have not confirmed one. CNN said no official has shared what was used, how it got on the airplane, or how the attack was carried out. A passenger, Ariel Oseran, filmed himself with blood on his forehead: "Anyone who hears me we need help. We are landing in Tabuk in Saudi Arabia area, an unknown and unfamiliar area. Everyone on the plane is healthy and whole except for the pilot." An unidentified man in another clip said "an attacker with a knife stabbed one of the pilots, we just jumped and took him out of the cockpit," that one pilot was severely wounded, that another was wounded but flying, and that two crew members were told to keep the door shut. A Channel 14 clip had a passenger saying the attacker was tied up and that his own clothes were covered in blood. Yasmin Abukasi told Reuters what her daughter Miriam had said from the cabin: the pilot screaming for help, the airplane losing control, people screaming, two other pilots taking over, a few Israelis running at a man with a knife who was trying to kill the pilot, putting him on the floor, a lot of blood. A passenger told i24 there were moments she believed she was going to die. On the way down to the runway, video showed passengers clapping and chanting "Od Avinu Chai," "Our Father lives." Photographs of a blood-stained shirt and jeans, which CNN blurred, showed a man who looked otherwise unhurt. The blood on other people's clothes is not a punchline. The captain is in the hospital.
The headcount is a mess, and the airline has not settled it. CNN said flydubai had not published how many people were on board, and had not said whether any passenger was injured beyond being safe and accounted for. Ynet's figure, carried by other aviation writeups, was 174 passengers, including 27 children. The Times of Israel said some 180 passengers, about 150 of them Israeli, including numerous children. The Jerusalem Post said over 100 Israeli passengers. Netanyahu said almost all were Israelis. Those are not the same census. Children were on the airplane. They are not the story's joke.
The Jerusalem Post also published a photo it captioned as damage to the rudder. No investigator has confirmed that caption. Treat it as a picture with a claim on it.
Getting home turned into a second argument. Relatives waiting at Ben Gurion told CNN that most passengers had boarded a substitute flydubai jet sent to Tabuk. About three families refused and said they would fly only on an Israeli carrier. An Israeli official told CNN that Israel had looked at sending a military or civilian airplane, and that Riyadh refused to let an Israeli plane collect them. Saudi Arabia has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Until 2022, Israeli airlines and Israel-bound flights were barred from Saudi airspace entirely. Cluster2 said it was coordinating a replacement aircraft. CNN said it had asked the Saudi government and, as of the page updated at 10:34 a.m. Eastern on Sept. 30, had no reply. The refusal is an Israeli official's account, not a Saudi press release.
The politicians did not wait for that reply. Defense Minister Israel Katz called it "an attempted jihadist terror attack" thwarted by Israeli passengers, and CNN noted he gave no evidence. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Israel "must relate to the intention and not to the results," and that the perpetrator "must pay as if he murdered. He and any state or terrorist organization that sent him." No authority has named a state or an organization. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir thanked the passengers and said Israel's security doctrine "must be taken to the next level." Yair Golan, Benny Gantz, and UN ambassador Danny Danon praised the people who fought in the aisle. US ambassador Mike Huckabee said Israelis helped subdue the copilot who apparently tried to take over the plane, that it could have been horrific, that everyone was safe, and that the details were still unclear. A third Israeli official told the Associated Press that Israel scrambled warplanes after contact trouble. The Times of Israel also reported fighters in the air. That scramble is a response. It is not a finding about motive.
The route exists because of the 2020 Abraham Accords. CNN, citing Flightradar24, said the Dubai-Tel Aviv corridor was running about 70 flights a week, with flydubai the main operator plus Emirates, Israir, and El Al. Ben Gurion data CNN cited in December put Israeli travel to Dubai at 1.1 million passengers in 2025. Flydubai is owned by the Dubai government through the Dubai Aviation Corporation, set up in 2008, and sits under the Investment Corporation of Dubai, the same owner as Emirates. It is a separate airline. It flies 131 destinations. The fleet is Boeing 737 variants. Its only fatal crash was in March 2016, a landing at Rostov-on-Don in high wind and bad visibility that killed all 62 people on board. Nothing public connects that crash to this flight. Do not blend them.
Israel's airport security is the strict kind. The Civil Aviation Authority and the Israel Airports Authority run it. Departing passengers get questions, more than one passport check, baggage scans, and sometimes a full-body screen. Ben Gurion tells people to show up three hours early. A foreign airline needs approval from the Aviation Security Operation Center before it can fly the country's airports. In 2022 Shin Bet raised concerns about security at Dubai International and the argument nearly stopped Israeli airlines from serving the city. The two sides signed a new agreement and the flights continued. The person Israeli officials accuse was not a passenger who talked his way past that line. They say he was sitting in the cockpit.
Our take
Ben Gurion will burn three hours of your life to ask why you went to Dubai. A foreign airline needs a government stamp before it can even park there. In 2022 the security service almost killed the route over the airport itself, then signed a paper and kept the jets coming. This morning the man Israeli officials accuse of stabbing the captain was not a tourist who skipped the questions. They say he was the co-pilot. Omani. Cleared for a Tel Aviv flight. Sitting in the seat with the controls, over a cabin Netanyahu says was almost entirely Israeli, with children in it, while the airplane fell out of 34,000 feet and somebody in the back decided to kick the door.
The airline, which owns the airplane and employs the crew, says it does not know why. That is the only sentence in this mess that admits the clock. Katz already has the word jihad and zero evidence to hang it on. Smotrich wants a murder sentence for a man who has not been named in public, plus a state or a terror group that no investigator has produced. Ben-Gvir wants the doctrine cranked up, as if the doctrine was what failed in row 1. The doctrine is the grandmother in the screening line. The allegation is that the knife, which passengers describe and no authority has confirmed, was already on the flight deck.
Then Saudi Arabia landed them, which is the part that worked, and an Israeli official says Riyadh will not let an Israeli jet come get its own people. Most of the cabin got back on another flydubai airplane. Three families looked at that offer and said no. Fair. You do not have to be a diplomat to decline a second ride with the same carrier an hour after the cockpit filled with blood.
The captain is in a hospital in Tabuk. The passengers who rushed the door are the reason CNN is writing a diversion story and not a crater story, if Netanyahu's passenger is telling it straight. The co-pilot, if the officials are right, tried to fly a 737 into the ground with a cabin full of the wrong passports. Flydubai says prove it. The politicians already printed the verdict. The screening line is still three hours long.
They pat down the cabin. The allegation is they cleared the co-pilot.
