Despite years of warnings, Transportation Ministry, required to check foreign flights, hasn’t done so

A former top official in the Transportation Ministry on Sunday accused Transportation Minister Miri Regev of responsibility for security failures surrounding foreign airlines flying to Israel, as scrutiny on the ministry intensified following last week’s terror attack by an Omani copilot aboard a flydubai flight to Tel Aviv.

The government, Regev and the Transportation Ministry have denied responsibility for any security breach preceding the incident, in which copilot Hamam al-Hammami stabbed the pilot and allegedly sought to crash the plane with its 180 passengers, almost all of them Israeli, and crew. The ministry said it does not have the capacity to perform background checks on foreign pilots, and that there was no way to definitively ensure the security of foreign flights into Israel.

But according to internal National Security Council documents cited Sunday by Army Radio, senior Israeli bodies have been warning for years that the Transportation Ministry has not been meeting its responsibilities in performing security checks on foreign airlines flying into Israel.

Keren Terner, who served as director general of the Transportation Ministry from 2016 to 2020 and is now running for a Knesset seat as the No. 3 on Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad electoral slate, placed the blame directly on Regev.

“You are responsible for the security regarding foreign airlines. Not the Shin Bet, not the Mossad. You,” Terner said, addressing the Likud minister.

The former top transportation official said that the Civil Aviation Authority has reported directly to the transportation minister since 2008, and that a classified state comptroller report from May 2024 proves that Regev had been alerted to shortcomings in the preparedness of the ministry’s security division.

“You were alerted, yet you took no action,” Terner charged, saying Regev later chose to retain responsibility for the security division within the ministry.

“Three years later, we must not let the October 7 government whitewash yet another failure,” Terner added.

Following Terner’s statement, Regev doubled down on her denial of responsibility.

“The Transportation Ministry is not an intelligence agency. It does not conduct checks, is not supposed to conduct checks, and has no access whatsoever to the data,” she said, claiming that only intelligence agencies have access to such information.

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, No. 2 on the B’Yachad slate, said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Regev, the Shin Bet and Mossad all owed the public “a rigorous accounting for one of the greatest failures we have seen,” and accused Netanyahu of quickly taking credit for the heroic actions of Israeli civilians on the plane but then going silent as questions began to emerge.

“Imagine that you have to board a flight with a baby and a four-year-old, and you hear a government representative say about the flydubai flight, ‘There is no 100% guarantee that this won’t happen again,’” Lapid said.

Hitting back, Regev accused Lapid of being “shallow, superficial and dishonest” in blaming her for the security failure that led to the incident, and said he “doesn’t understand anything about aviation.”

Report: Top ministry officials were warned for years

Separate internal documents reported by Army Radio on Sunday indicated that concerns over the division of responsibility for screening foreign airlines had been raised for years.

In 2021, the security cabinet removed responsibility from the Shin Bet and determined that the Transportation Ministry’s Civil Aviation Authority would “check that the security instructions in the foreign countries that are not classified as highest risk meet the regulations of international treaties.”

A classified 2024 state comptroller report found that the ministry was not meeting its obligations, according to a document shared by Army Radio.

On May 23, 2024, the security cabinet ordered the National Security Council to establish a team within 90 days composed of representatives of the Transportation Ministry, the CAA, Shin Bet, Mossad, and Finance Ministry to “examine the security framework for international commercial flights into Israel, and to put together recommendations for changes.”

In those discussions, which went on for a year, the Shin Bet stressed that it did not have the manpower or budget to handle security checks for foreign flights.

The NSC concurred, writing that “it is appropriate for the Transportation Ministry to fulfill its responsibility over foreign flights… in order for the Civil Aviation Authority to be able to take responsibility for the matter, it will require appropriate manpower and budget.”

CAA head Shmuel Zakai agreed, according to the NSC documents.

However, the Transportation Ministry’s security chief, Avri Cohen, fired back that the ministry could not take on such a large security challenge, and fumed at Zakai for agreeing to something that “you know is too big for you,” according to Army Radio.

There are only three civil servants in the ministry’s security division, according to the report, and the rest — dozens of employees — are civilian contractors.

“The entire professional team at the Transportation Ministry strongly opposed the transfer of authorities, except for the head of the Civil Aviation Authority, Shmuel Zakai,” a source involved in the discussions told Army Radio. “They all stood up and told Minister Miri Regev that it would be a grave mistake to take on such a huge responsibility.”

They told her that the ministry would have no way of knowing that a Syrian migrant to the United Kingdom who flies to Israel was raised in an enemy state, as was al-Hammami, the Omani flydubai copilot.

“There were… confrontations, and sharply worded letters, but Minister Regev, CEO [Moshe] Ben Zaken, and CAA head Zakai didn’t listen,” the source said. “The minister went with Zakai’s position, and in the meeting they had with the prime minister, they came out of the discussion with the responsibility transferred to the Transportation Ministry.”

In 2025, Netanyahu indeed determined that security responsibility for foreign flights would be fully transferred to the Transportation Ministry, according to Army Radio.

In March of the same year, the NSC offered its own warning in a written document that the Transportation Ministry was not fulfilling its role in overseeing security checks of foreign flights.

Despite the self-acknowledged lack of resources in the ministry, it didn’t ask the Shin Bet or Mossad for assistance in investigating a single passenger or crew member, the report said.

Meanwhile, while the two intelligence agencies knew that the Transportation Ministry was in over its head, they didn’t move to fill the gap.

“The Shin Bet and Mossad knew full well that the Transportation Ministry was in a shambles, that it had no people, no positions, and no capabilities,” a source said. “How did they just shrug off responsibility like that and dump everything on the Transportation Ministry? The responsibility lies with the Transportation Ministry, but the Shin Bet and Mossad also enabled this failure, and the writing was on the wall.”

Reacting to the report, the Transportation Ministry called the claims “completely false.”

It said the ministry’s responsibility for foreign flights had been in place for decades, and that “presenting it as a new task transferred to the ministry in recent years is incorrect.”

The ministry added that the NSC and other security bodies approved the ministry’s procedures.

“Two committees that operated in the past under the chairmanship of the National Security Council recommended the establishment of a state authority for aviation security, which would be responsible for all flights,” the response continued. “The Transportation Ministry supported and still supports the establishment of such a comprehensive body, but the recommendations were not implemented.”

Israel given list of crew, raised no objections – officials

Meanwhile, regional officials told AP that Emirati authorities had provided Israel with a list of the flydubai flight’s passengers and crew before departure, including their nationalities.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the probe, said Israel had raised no red flags over any passenger or crew member.

The Omani copilot had been barred from flying by authorities in Oman because of concerns over his extremist views. It remained unclear how he was permitted to crew an Israel-bound flight given that Oman does not have diplomatic relations with Israel.

Israeli regulations reportedly bar pilots who are citizens of countries without diplomatic relations with Israel from flying into the country, while legislation passed more than three years ago requires flight-crew lists to be provided to Israeli security authorities. Netanyahu said after the attack that Israel had longstanding arrangements with foreign airlines preventing such pilots from flying into Israel.

A former airport employee told Channel 12 on Sunday that she had processed pilots and flight attendants who held passports from countries hostile to Israel. “I personally handled at the counter aircrew members, pilots and flight attendants with Lebanese, Syrian and other passports,” she said. “Failures like these have always existed across the airlines, not only with the Emiratis.”

The former employee said crew members from hostile countries had passed through the airport on numerous occasions and that some attempted to enter Israel. When the system detected an additional passport they carried, however, they were refused entry, she said. “Even then, we didn’t understand how pilots from enemy countries were flying to Israel,” she told Channel 12.

Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Boaz Bismuth will convene a special meeting of the committee’s Intelligence Subcommittee on Tuesday to examine the flydubai attack and related security procedures, Hebrew media reported Sunday. Representatives of the Shin Bet, Mossad, National Security Council and Transportation Ministry are expected to participate.

Times of Israel staff and the Associated Press contributed to this report.