As time passes, more and more details are coming to light about the depth of the failure by the Shin Bet and the Ministry of Transportation, which allowed the Omani co-pilot—a declared jihadist and an al-Qaeda sympathizer who made no secret of his ideology—to board the flight from Dubai to Ben-Gurion Airport last week.

David Zini has headed the Shin Bet for about a year. Transportation Minister Miri Regev has held her post since Benjamin Netanyahu formed his government nearly four years ago; she previously served in the Netanyahu-Gantz government (May 2020-June 2021). Both owe their positions to Prime Minister Netanyahu and, like him, are shirking responsibility for the failure while trading blame.

Like Netanyahu, both are plainly guilty of negligence—of the gravest kind in the country’s history. They ignored guidelines their own agencies had drawn up—and whose implementation they were supposed to oversee. Their failure left a passenger plane carrying 170 passengers only minutes away from being deliberately crashed in a suicide attack on Israeli soil—an attack that could have caused further deaths, as in the infamous 9/11 attacks.

For those who have forgotten: the Shin Bet, which is responsible for monitoring social media, could and should have found documentation and evidence regarding the co-pilot’s past. This information was publicly available; it did not require intelligence gathering. L, who heads the Shin Bet’s Security Division—which is also responsible for aviation matters—was appointed in 2024 by the previous Shin Bet chief, Ronen Bar.

L spent his entire career in the Security Division, where he held a range of positions. He previously served as a combat instructor, a security officer in the Southern District, and head of the Shin Bet’s combat school. As far as can be determined, L has no background in aviation.

The Ministry of Transportation has a Security Department headed by Avraham Cohen. According to the ministry’s website, the department is responsible for securing about 30 ministry facilities, preventing sabotage and weapons smuggling, and overseeing transport security. This includes operating an Aviation Security Operations Center that handles security procedures, airspace security, and the security screening of foreign flights and candidates.

In other words, the center is required to brief flight crews and airlines, supervise security-screening and identity-verification units, and maintain ongoing contact with the Shin Bet, the Israel Airports Authority, the Air Force, and other security bodies.

Flydubai Flight FZ1073 is precisely the type of flight that requires security clearance from the Ministry of Transportation and the Shin Bet.

As one of the lessons of the 9/11 attacks, and in response to fears of aerial terrorist attacks, the Shin Bet established a procedure requiring airlines flying to Israel to submit the details of foreign pilots and crew members to the Ministry of Transportation in advance, so that the ministry, with the Shin Bet’s assistance, could conduct security checks. This procedure applies especially to pilots and crew from countries that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel—mostly Arab or Muslim states.

The division of responsibilities is clear: the Shin Bet provides the professional guidance to the Ministry of Transportation, which is expected to follow the service’s directives as the regulator. It has now emerged that Omani pilots were not the only ones flying to Israel. Syrians, Iranians, and Iraqis with dual passports were also doing so. Neither body fulfilled its duty.

Transportation Minister Miri Regev (Photo: Flash90)

Journalists—including CNN reporters—and users on X did what the Shin Bet and the Ministry of Transportation either failed to do or did negligently. Over the weekend, they combed social media and found material about the past of the co-pilot, a terrorist with suicidal tendencies.

His name is Hammam al-Hamami. He is 29 years old and was born in the United Arab Emirates to an Omani father and a Syrian mother. His LinkedIn profile—unless it turns out to be fake—states that he worked for Oman Air for seven years and left in February 2025 before joining Royal Air Maroc in June 2025; he left that airline in January 2026. This employment history alone should have raised a red flag.

The CNN report describes posts from the account but does not explain how they came to be published some nine hours after the incident had already ended. The posts include a series of videos filmed from the cockpits of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft—the same model as the plane he intended to crash.

In another video, geolocated by CNN to Dubai International Airport on October 11, 2023, there is a close-up of an El Al aircraft. Other clips show additional El Al planes and an Arkia aircraft—another Israeli airline.

The video ends with images of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who led al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden was killed, and Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi.

Al-Balawi was a Jordanian physician and jihadist activist, also known online as Abu Dujana al-Khurasani. According to U.S. sources, Jordanian intelligence and the CIA believed he was cooperating with them and serving as a double agent inside al-Qaeda, but he was actually working for the terrorist organization. On December 30, 2009, he arrived for a meeting at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan’s eastern Khost Province, near the Pakistani border, with CIA officers who believed they were running him.

Al-Balawi detonated the explosive device he was carrying and was killed on the spot, along with nine other people: seven CIA personnel and U.S. contractors, a Jordanian intelligence officer, and an Afghan driver. Six others were injured. The incident is considered one of the deadliest attacks suffered by the CIA in Afghanistan.

Another post shows an AI-generated image of Islam’s three holiest sites—Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem—connected by a single glowing path. In the background, a defiant poem is recited; according to CNN, it rejects humiliation, expresses a lack of fear of death, and calls for preserving one’s dignity.

Hammam al-Hamami

Al-Hamami had a deleted Twitter account, but CNN reconstructed it and reports that it portrays him as a highly religious man with misogynistic views. The reconstructed posts show that he wrote that his mother had failed in her efforts to find him a future wife willing to meet his terms: wearing a niqab and stopping work after marriage. “They all refused. Then my mother told them, ‘My son is a pilot,’ and suddenly they all agreed,” he wrote in a February 2022 post.

The posts also railed against mixed-gender workplaces, claiming that they corrupt women. “How many respectable, religious women have been ruined by mixed workplaces and fallen prey to manipulation?” he wrote in a January 2022 post.

In fact, al-Hamami was fired by Oman Air in 2025 for his extremist views. One central question in the Emirati security services’ investigation, after they took custody of the Omani pilot, will be whether Oman Air informed the UAE authorities about his past.

It will also have to be determined whether the Omanis—whose security services maintain close cooperation with their Israeli counterparts (Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Netanyahu, along with Mossad chiefs, have visited Muscat, the Omani capital)—reported the pilot to their Israeli counterparts as well.

Of course, a pilot with suicidal tendencies or mental-health problems can come from any country and be of any nationality. But the fact is that, since 1999, most pilots or suicide attackers of this kind have been of Arab-Muslim origin: an Egyptian who crashed a jumbo jet after taking off from New York; the al-Qaeda hijackers of September 11, who committed suicide aboard four passenger planes; and a Malaysian pilot who apparently killed himself in 2014, whose plane’s wreckage has not been found to this day. There were also earlier attempts by jihadist terrorists to hijack planes and crash them in the Philippines and the United States. As far as is known, the only Western pilot to have done so was a German co-pilot, who killed himself by crashing a passenger plane into the Alps in 2015.

The Shin Bet’s and the Ministry of Transportation’s failure is all the more glaring because we live in a country that subjects foreign nationals with Arab or Muslim names—even those from friendly countries—to intense scrutiny, and expels human-rights activists seeking to reach the West Bank, including members of parliament from Western countries who come to protest the occupation. If the Shin Bet had applied even one thousandth of that excessive zeal to its aviation duties, the incident would have been averted.

It is clear that lessons will now be learned, as they have been after every aviation incident in the past. The loophole will be closed, and security checks will be tightened for crew members—not only passengers and their luggage. But what about responsibility?

Until now, Zini was seen as a Netanyahu loyalist and a messianic believer in Jewish supremacy. From now on, he will also bear the mark of Cain as one of those responsible for an exceptionally serious security failure. There is little point in wasting words on Miri Regev’s record of appointing political cronies or on her inaction across all areas of transportation. The person who appointed them—Prime Minister Netanyahu—must also be held to account.

But don’t hold your breath. Those responsible will face no personal consequences, nor will they accept responsibility. As they did after October 7, Netanyahu’s government and its ministers are failing to function. It is citizens who are filling the vacuum: civil-society organizations after the October 7 failure, and, in the case of the Flydubai plane, four courageous Israeli citizens. Together with a heroic Indian pilot and two British pilots on board the flight, they saw death coming and sprang into action.

The Israeli public should take these facts to heart, too, and draw its conclusions at the election, just weeks away.

This article was originally published in Hebrew on October 3rd, 2026.