Omani co-pilot Hamam al-Hamami wanted to crash a flydubai plane at Israel's Ben Gurion airport and cause mass casualties, Israeli officials said. He tried to hijack flight FZ1073 on its way to Israel.

This story follows our earlier report on the September 30 incident, when a flydubai plane flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia after a fight in the cockpit. Early media reports said the pilots were Russian and Ukrainian, but it later emerged that the co-pilot is from Oman.

Investigators say al-Hamami planned to fly towards Israel as if the landing at Ben Gurion were routine, then crash the plane into the airport. If he could not get that far, his fallback was to crash it into a US military base in Jordan.

He intended to hit the captain several times with the emergency axe until he was knocked out, then take the controls. He only moved to seize the plane after it had entered Jordanian airspace.

Al-Hamami had set the attack for July but called it off because he had a personal tie to a crew member on that flight. He decided to "spare" him and wait for another chance. He had already landed in Israel in June. According to what investigators have found so far, he was preparing to become a "martyr".

He told investigators he had deliberately looked for a job with an airline that flies to Tel Aviv. He checked which carriers had such flights and chose flydubai for that reason. He applied to all of them and had planned the operation before he was hired.

The plan failed thanks to Israeli passengers, the pilots who landed the plane safely, and the resistance of the Indian captain, Smit Machhar. Attacked in the cockpit, Machhar fought for his life and the lives of the passengers.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered a review of security on foreign civilian flights to Israel, his office said earlier on Sunday. He told National Security Council head Shmuel Ben Ezra to appoint someone to carry it out. The review will be internal only, and the person appointed will have no powers to investigate or to enforce the law.

With this decision Netanyahu is going back to recommendations made by state comptroller Matanyahu Englman in May 2024. Englman's report at the time pointed to serious gaps, including in security on foreign airlines' planes. He also found weak oversight of foreign crews arriving in Israel.

His main recommendation was for the National Security Council to lead a full review with the transport and finance ministries, the Airports Authority, the Shin Bet and the police, and to draw up updated common rules for aviation security. Ben Ezra had been in charge of the issue through the council until now, without fixing the gaps found in earlier reviews.

A person close to Netanyahu rejected criticism of the decision. "It is normal and lawful, when such an incident happens and exposes a gap in a given area, for the prime minister to order the weaknesses to be checked and fixed so that such an incident does not happen again," he said.