A commercial passenger jet bound for Tel Aviv from Dubai made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia after an apparent fight broke out between the co-pilots, according to the airline, officials and reports in Israeli media.
Details of the incident are still emerging, but all the passengers on the flight are safe and accounted for, according to FlyDubai, the airline, and the office of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A spokesperson for Netanyahu said the incident was not believed to have been a hijacking. However, reports in the Times of Israel and other local media outlets indicated a fight between the pilots did break out.
Yasmin Abukasis, whose daughter Miriam was on the flight, said her daughter told her she heard screaming, saw a man pull out a knife and force one of the pilots to the floor, with blood everywhere,” the Times of Israel reported.
“It’s a crazy, crazy time, it’s very hard to explain what happened there,” she said.
Other passengers described helping to subdue one of the pilots.
Authorities have not confirmed those accounts.
The FlyDubai plane departed from the United Arab Emirates’ city-state early on Sept. 30. It signaled it was experiencing an onboard security incident two hours into the flight, according to Flightradar24, a tracking website.
The jet then underwent what Flightradar24 described as “extreme fluctuations in the transmitted altitude data.” It descended more than 17,000 feet in less than two minutes, when it changed its so-called emergency squawk code to “7500.” That number is used by pilots to indicate an unlawful interference or hijacking on a plane.
Neither FlyDubai nor Israeli and Emirati officials responded to requests for more information about the incident.
Direct commercial flights between Israel and Dubai only started in 2020 following the normalization of relations between the two countries as part of the Trump administration-brokered Abraham Accords. That agreement is a series of regional economic agreements involving Israel and various Gulf states.
An Israeli official told the Times of Israel that a “major disaster had been averted.”