Regev doubles down on denial of responsibility for flydubai security failures, hits back at Lapid

Transportation Minister Miri Regev doubles down on her denial of responsibility for the security failures surrounding last week’s near-disastrous flydubai flight, as she lashes Opposition Leader Yair Lapid for accusing her ministry of failing to prevent the attack.

“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,” Regev says, arguing that only intelligence agencies have access to such information. She accuses Lapid of being “shallow, superficial and dishonest,” and says he “doesn’t understand anything about aviation.”

Her comments follow reports that senior Israeli bodies have warned for years that the Transportation Ministry has failed to fulfill its responsibilities for security checks on foreign airlines flying to Israel, including overseeing foreign airlines’ vetting of pilots flying to Israel.

Regev was responding to Lapid, now the No. 2 candidate on Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad slate, who seized on comments made Saturday night by a Transportation Ministry representative acknowledging that the ministry does not conduct background checks on foreign pilots and cannot guarantee another such incident will not occur.

“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. “What you and your children need is a team of doers who will take responsibility for all our lives. Only B’Yachad.”