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Plumber by Trade, Army Cook by Duty: The Hero of Flight 1073 Reveals the Incredible Story of the Hijacking and Rescue

Almost a year since the fighting stopped in Gaza, and in the face of a growing pile of evidence that no such thing occurred, anti-Israel activists are desperately trying to keep the genocide accusation alive. This week, three more complications threatened its survival. The question is how much longer they can keep it up. Between March 2 and May 19, 2025, Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, betting that they had sent enough food to prevent mass starvation. It did not account for bottlenecks and hoarding. Grain prices skyrocketed. Reports of malnutrition mounted. By July, aid agencies said more than 12,000 children had been identified as acutely malnourished, the highest monthly figure on record. That month, The New York Times ran “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation” on its front page. Its most effective argument was the photo on the front page: a child with a protruding spine, cradled in his mother’s arms. That the child had cerebral palsy, and that his brother, who was not skin and bones, had been quietly cropped out, the Times admitted just as quietly days later. The tens of thousands said to be collapsing from hunger were supposedly buried in the ministry’s count of indirect deaths. This week, the Gaza Health Ministry released the full count. There were no mountains of skeletons. Obviously. Had there been, they would have made the Times’ front page instead of a cropped photograph. In its Annual Mortality Report for 2025, the ministry lists 24,650 registered deaths. Of those, 17,286 are attributed to “war operations” and another 1,584 to accidents. That leaves 5,780 deaths from everything else: heart disease, cancer, old age. Roughly what Gaza buried in a normal prewar year. The report lands two years after 99 physicians wrote to President Joe Biden alleging that 62,413 people had likely died of starvation and its complications between October 7, 2023, and September 30, 2024. A 2024 letter in The Lancet floated 186,000 total deaths. In 2025, the year of the famine, the ministry’s own data shows no meaningful excess of non-violent deaths. The creative accounting doesn’t end there. Take the infant data. Malnutrition accounted for 4.1 percent of infant deaths in 2025. In 2021, it was 4.4 percent. And 2025 was the year famine was declared in Gaza City. The ministry’s report leads with the war dead and highlights an under-five mortality rate that more than doubled. Strip out the war deaths, though, and its own figure falls to 15.8 per 1,000. In 2022, it was 13.6. Over the same period, the ministry registered 50,227 births. By its own count, Gaza’s population grew by 1.2 percent in 2025, faster than the global average. If Israel is committing genocide, it is the most incompetent perpetrator in the history of mankind. None of this means Gazans were feasting for two years. But the most repeated accusations were not “Gazans struggle with imbalanced diet” or “Food grows scarce under war conditions,” because neither carries the rhetorical power to justify any and all action against the accused while absolving the accusers of the burden of proof. The genocide conspiracy had a second pillar. To hide its crime, Israel had to ban the international press and silence the truth-tellers on the ground. Yesterday, the IDF revealed that of the Gazans killed during the war and presented to the world as journalists or media workers, 170 were members of terrorist organizations. 118 belonged to Hamas’s military wing. 49 to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The remaining three to smaller factions. 17 took part in the October 7 massacre. More than 40 of their deaths had drawn condemnation from the United Nations. I’m sure that now that their identities are known, the rest will receive similar condolences. Some of the résumés are impressive. Amro Nahid Abdel Rahman Abu Odeh worked for Reuters and Turkey’s Anadolu Agency. He was also, per the IDF, a team commander in the photography unit of Hamas’s military wing. The military published two photos of him: one holding a camera, one holding a Kalashnikov. Hassan Majdi Ibrahim Abu Warda filed for the Barq Gaza news agency and moonlighted, according to the IDF, as a sniper in Islamic Jihad’s Northern Gaza Brigade. Others on the list had worked with CNN, the BBC, AP, AFP, ABC News, Le Monde and Australia’s ABC. Perhaps the most important pillar of the genocide libel is its senselessness. Genocides are not waged out of reasonable security concerns, nor are they triggered by atrocities committed by the victims. They are acts of pure cruelty. That is why the genocide campaign has systematically sought to sever October 7 from the Gaza war, and from history itself. Which makes yesterday awkward. For the first time this millennium, a full year passed without a single rocket fired into Israel from Gaza. Perhaps, then, it was a war of security after all, not of extermination. Apply Occam’s razor. There was no mass starvation. There was no war on journalists. And when it was over, Israelis were safer than before. You can explain all of that with one simple word: war. Or you can call it genocide, and simply contort the dwindling pieces of evidence to fit that conclusion. Using Occam’s razor assumes that logic has been the accusers’ goal. Had that been the case, we would never have gotten this far. The question is not when they will recant and beg Israel’s forgiveness, but when the evidence will become so overwhelming that the lie simply cannot be sustained. Speedily, and in our days.

The Indian pilot in a conversation with Netanyahu.

"We will never be silent about injustice,” Ed Miliband declared when he presented the new measures against Israel at the Labour Party conference. When the victims are citizens of the Jewish state, Miliband suddenly becomes cautious. Faced with an attempted mass killing of passengers on a Flydubai flight to Tel Aviv, he offered this bland statement: “Deeply concerned about the incident that occurred on the Flydubai flight to Israel.” After all, it was only an apparent attempt to murder 174 people—not construction of new homes near the Dead Sea. The foreign secretary paid lip service by condemning Hamas before clarifying that Israel is committing ethnic cleansing and war crimes. In practice, mentioning Hamas only made the situation worse: he equated the barbaric terrorist organization with the State of Israel that was defending itself against it. Miliband did not remain silent when the Iranians slaughtered thousands of their own people in the streets. In fact, he spoke out loudly—but against any response. It was he who, in the British cabinet meeting on the eve of the “Epic Fury” operation, led the opposition to allowing the United States to use British military bases for attacks on the ayatollah’s regime. Just last week, he held a friendly meeting at the U.N. with the Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Churchill was lucky not to have a foreign secretary who met with von Ribbentrop and prevented Roosevelt from using bases in London to prepare for D-Day. If Miliband truly believes that he “will never be silent in the face of injustice and ethnic cleansing,” how does he continue to cultivate the Palestinian Authority, whose laws forbid the sale of land to Jews (yes, that would include Ed Miliband himself)? How does he fight for a Palestinian Authority that wishes, indeed, to establish two states: one, Palestine, without a single Jew, and the other, Israel, a state of all its citizens? Did Miliband himself, with his immense sensitivity to human life, ever shout on the phone at the president of the Palestinian Authority over the law that allocates 7 percent of the PA’s budget to murderers of Jews, where the more you murder, the more you receive? Did he freeze aid budgets until the Palestinian education system in the West Bank stops teaching third-grade math in schools with the exercise: “Ahmed killed three Zionist pigs, Muhammad killed four. How many did they kill altogether?” There is, indeed, an attempt at ethnic cleansing between the Jordan River and the sea, and it is by the Palestinians against the Jews. There is a direct line from the October 7 massacre to the incitement in the education system in Judea and Samaria, to the payment of murderers, to the fact that most people in the Palestinian Authority support murder. There is a fierce debate between Israel and Britain regarding the future of Judea and Samaria. This is a legitimate political debate. There is violence by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in the West Bank. This is a despicable phenomenon, although even in the West Bank it is not the worst instance of violence. Palestinian terrorist organizations try to murder Israelis every single day, yet Miliband does not bother to condemn it. Labour has—in practice if not in rhetoric—consistently acted to preserve Hamas’s rule in Gaza even after the atrocities of October 7. It has done this by demanding time and again for the war to stop before the terrorist organization has been eliminated. Now, it is doing its best to establish a terror state five minutes away from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. It is no wonder that no government formed in Israel after October’s elections, no matter how left-wing it may be, will be able to allow the establishment of such a state. When it slaughters Jews, Miliband will do his best to prevent Israel from fighting it. If someone got their news on world events exclusively from the British foreign secretary’s Twitter account, they might think that the greatest evil empire in the world is Israel, followed—after a massive gap—by Russia, Iran and perhaps North Korea. The reason for this assault on the Jewish state is political: the strengthening of the Green Party with its fiercely “anti-Zionist” platform. That is why the campaign against Israel ratcheted up with the arrival of party conference season. Miliband will run every red light on his way to stopping the Greens. If Labour were led by the successors of Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, it would be busy moving toward the center and caring for the average Briton. It would be busy eradicating the antisemitism spreading throughout Britain, and would do all in its power to ensure the four independent “pro-Gaza” MPs elected in 2024 would be defeated at the next election. But the current Labour Party is the heir of Jeremy Corbyn. Its current stance should require the party to apologize for expelling him from its ranks: today, there are very many Corbyns within Labour’s ranks. Miliband is not the first Jew to joyfully point a false and accusing finger at his own people. If he comes to Jerusalem, he should watch out for heckling against him. If he goes to Ramallah and he doesn’t have the security that goes with being Britain’s foreign secretary, as a Jew he should fear much worse. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…

“We will never be silent about injustice,” Ed Miliband declared when he presented the new measures against Israel at the Labour Party conference. When the victims are citizens of the Jewish state, Miliband suddenly becomes cautious. Also, the genocide accusation on life support. All in today's edition of It's Noon in Israel. open.substack.com/pub/amitse…

Yesterday marked one year since the last rocket fired from the Gaza Strip crossed into Israeli territory. A full year without rockets or missiles from Gaza, for the first time this century.

Trump: From what I’ve heard, Iran is connected to the attempted attack on the plane.

Heroes of Flight 1073: When the terrorist realized he had failed, he asked us to kill him

Let us consider for a moment that very likely world in which Capt. Smit Machchhar was slightly less heroic and could not overcome his stab wound to open the cockpit door. Or one in which passengers Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans and Assaf Rajuan did not burst in in time. Or one in which Yaniv, a plumber by trade, had never watched a docuseries on plane crashes and did not know how to pull out of the dive. Or one in which there were no other pilots on board to land the plane safely. The terrorist crashes the plane into the ground, his motivations utterly inscrutable to international media and obvious to those with an ounce of thought. Today, if the crown prince allowed, Israelis would be on the ground picking through wreckage in search of 174 bodies, 27 of them children. Thanks for reading It's Noon In Israel! This post is public so feel free to share it. The central artery of the Abraham Accords, the 30-plane-a-day flight corridor, would be severed, and the steadily warming relations between the Emirates and Israel would freeze. The day would go down as the second-deadliest terror attack in the country’s history, with nearly five times the death toll of the third. Falling just days before the third Hebrew anniversary of the worst attack, it might have permanently cost the Sukkot festival its traditional name: “the time of our joy.” An outpouring of sympathy would be quickly followed by a return to normal. The world has never understood Israelis well enough to forgive their security, yet almost always understands terrorists well enough to forgive their violence. British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband and his ilk would announce further sanctions on violent Israelis, and the international media would rush to cite a myriad of possible motivations for the massacre. As it is, the terrorist can take comfort in knowing that the international media has not stripped him of his wings. He is still “the pilot,” and what he did is still an “incident,” to borrow Miliband’s label. Thankfully, we woke up in the other world: the one where the terrorist failed, the festival goes on, planes continue to fly, and Israel’s will to fight burns hotter than before. It is the world created by Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans, Assaf Rajuan and Smit Machchhar, ordinary people who demonstrated extraordinary courage. To read the rest of today's newsletter click here amitsegal.substack.com/p/its…

Netanyahu to Fox News: “The pilot who carried out the stabbing underwent a process of Islamic radicalization. They may try something like this again. We have indications that the Iranians may try to strike Israeli targets, especially during the election period.”

An Emirati-employed pilot and Israeli passengers together successfully fought off terror

Trump is not taking a position on the elections, and regarding future cooperation with Eisenkot, he says: “I haven’t heard anything bad about him.”

Trump: I don’t believe reports that Netanyahu received warnings from the UAE and Egypt before October 7.

Israeli social media is awash in a torrent of celebration, praise and gallows humor. By every reasonable expectation, the country should have woken this morning to grief: to names and faces, and to the long, familiar litany of condolence. Instead, it woke to memes. With a terrorist hijacking averted, what now awaits Israel and the region? All in today's special edition of It's Noon in Israel. open.substack.com/pub/amitse…

Now in the Cave of the Patriarchs: A worshipper stood on a chair and asked to thank God for the great miracle on the plane. Everyone broke into songs and dances of thanksgiving.

The Israeli President will recommend awarding the “President’s Medal for Civilian Heroism” to the four heroes of the flight from Dubai: Yaniv Hayon, Dr. Shota Musaev, Tzvika Mans, and Assaf Rejwan.

A short list of today's miracles: The pilot opened the cockpit door moments before collapsing The heroes, Yaniv, Assaf, and Tzvika, happened to be at the front of the plane. British pilots happened to be on the flight Yaniv had watched the “Air Crash Investigation” docuseries and pushed the controls forward. Without every single one of them, tonight we’d be searching for wreckage in the deserts of Saudi Arabia—and even that only if the prince allowed it.

Reactions to the incident in Saudi Arabia: Mamdani: Condemns the illegal entry of Israelis into Saudi Arabia, this is part of the Greater Israel movement. European Union: Calls on all sides in the cockpit to cease the mutual violence. United Kingdom: We will impose sanctions on extremist Israelis who stormed the cockpit and handcuffed a Muslim. Al Jazeera: Twenty-seven children and six pilots killed in an Israeli strike. The New York Times: Plane nearly crashes into Saudi Arabia amid clashes between Israelis and Muslims.