הוֹד֣וּ לַה֣׳ כִּי־ט֑וֹב כִּ֖י לְעוֹלָ֣ם חַסְדּֽוֹ
Based on information from @YBCisrael.
Only now, after the Omani terrorist’s confession, are we beginning to understand the size of the tragedy that, thank God, did not happen.
To appreciate the miracle and the Divine intervention that saved us, I ask you to come with me for a moment to a very dark place. It is the scenario that, according to Israel’s security services, should have happened.
Close your eyes and picture this. A routine Flydubai flight is on approach to Ben Gurion Airport. Since the plane left the United Arab Emirates, everything has looked perfectly normal on the radar screens in Dubai. Inside the plane, too, nobody notices anything unusual. It is an ordinary, uneventful flight. But in the locked cockpit only one pilot is flying the plane: the co-pilot, Hamam al-Hammami, an Omani terrorist. A few minutes earlier he murdered the captain, Smit Machchhar, who now lies on the floor, dead and covered in blood.
The terrorist killed him with the axe kept in the cockpit for emergencies, when a window or the cabin wall has to be broken from the inside. Hamam got up from his seat and told the captain he was going to pray. When the captain looked away, Hamam attacked him from behind, struck him on the head with the axe and pushed him away from the controls. Nobody heard anything unusual from the cockpit, whose door, for security reasons, must remain fully closed. Neither the crew nor the passengers noticed anything strange or realized what was happening.
With the captain out of the way, the terrorist took the controls and flew calmly toward his target: Ben Gurion Airport. There was no panic and no warning sign, not inside the plane and not to the control towers, because Captain Smit Machchhar had no time to react or to trigger any alarm.
Terminal 3 at Tel Aviv’s airport is packed. It is Chol HaMoed Sukkot, and the airport is full of travelers arriving in Israel and leaving it. According to Israel Hayom, about 100,000 people pass through the airport each day at this time of year. At any given moment, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people, travelers and workers, are inside the Ben Gurion terminal.
As he approaches Ben Gurion, the suicide terrorist carries out the operation he spent years preparing for: crashing the plane into the passenger terminal. In true 9/11 style, a plane full of Israeli passengers will be used as a weapon.
This would have been Israel’s 9/11, only many times worse. We were saved. By the heroism of Captain Smit and by a chain of miracles, with Israeli heroes and one Divine hero. Bore Olam stepped in to save us from a tragedy whose proportions we are only now beginning to grasp.
In the middle of Sukkot, days before Simchat Torah, three years after October 7, we would be in mourning, facing, God forbid, thousands dead and tens of thousands wounded in Medinat Israel.
We must thank God for saving us and ask Him to please keep being with us.
That is what we did these days of Sukkot, when we repeated several times in the Hallel the extended biblical formula for thanking God. In this case it carries even more meaning than “Baruch HaShem.” King David coined it to thank God in Hebrew: Hodu la-A-donai ki tov, ki le’olam chasdo! “Let us thank God because we are well [safe], and may His kindness toward us [the people of Israel] last forever.”
With these words we do not only thank God because we are safe. We also ask Him, and declare with Jewish optimism, that He will keep being with us, protecting us from our enemies.
