October 5, 2026
The Flydubai incident brought back to the forefront the issue of air crews coming to Israel from countries that it classifies as “enemy countries,” based on testimony given by a former employee at Ben Gurion Airport, in which she revealed the passage of pilots and flight attendants holding Lebanese passports.
In a report prepared by journalist Dean Fisher and broadcast by Israeli Channel 12, the employee confirmed that she personally passed through the screening platform members of the air crew, including pilots and flight attendants who hold Lebanese nationality, noting that this phenomenon is not the result of the moment, and that “such failures have existed for a long time in various airline companies, and not in Emirati companies alone.” She explained that a significant number of hosts coming from enemy countries crossed the airport with complete ease.
However, the certificate distinguished between the crossing of air crew members and an attempt to enter Israeli territory, pointing out that some of them attempted to enter and had applications filed against them that were rejected immediately after the system issued an alert regarding the additional passports they carried. She added in amazement: “Even in those cases, we did not understand how pilots from enemy countries were allowed to fly flights to Israel.”
This testimony sheds light on possible security gaps at Ben Gurion Airport, at a time when the Israeli media is raising questions about the identities of these Lebanese, and whether the Lebanese authorities are aware of these flights and the nature of the measures taken regarding them. These developments come days after an attempt to hijack a Flydubai plane, while Israeli security authorities are investigating the possibility that pilots with dual nationalities, one of which is from an enemy country, landed at Ben Gurion Airport during the past years.
Channel 12 reported in its bulletin on Saturday evening that the co-pilot, Humam Al-Hamami, who is suspected of trying to shoot down the plane that was carrying 174 Israeli passengers, had previously visited Israel before the incident, and his last landing was at Ben Gurion Airport a week before. The report indicated that the Israeli authorities have not yet been authorized to interrogate him, and are currently relying on intelligence information received from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with the possibility of allowing them to interrogate him at a later time.
In the official context, the Security Department of the Israeli Ministry of Transport, in its first press briefing since the attempted attack on Saturday evening, denied that it had previously received any lists of names of crew members. He stressed that all employees underwent background checks under the responsibility of the airline companies that are required to confirm this, explaining that the department is not an intelligence agency called upon to examine the backgrounds of foreign crews, but rather relies only on the airline companies and the countries concerned.
On the organizational level, the Director of the Israeli Civil Aviation Authority, Shmuel Zakai, announced that the authorities had issued instructions to Flydubai to stop its flights to Israel until investigations were completed, with the aim of ensuring that there were no other security gaps, and to verify whether the perpetrator of the attack had acted individually.
