In recent weeks — largely unnoticed, at the bottom of the news — there was a major dispute between Shin Bet Director David Zini and Israel's airlines over a ban the Shin Bet had imposed on flights to the UAE. The agency's reasoning was straightforward: it considered security measures at Emirati airports insufficient, and since the Shin Bet is responsible for securing Israeli flights to and from Israel, it dug in and blocked those flights from going ahead.

That dispute connects to this incident. The security measures in place for flights to Israel could plausibly have helped prevent this attack — especially given that the pilot appears to have brought the weapon on board himself, whether a knife or an axe (it remains unclear which he used to stab the co-pilot in his attempt to crash the plane).

It's worth being precise about jurisdiction here. The Shin Bet is responsible for Israeli flights; the Ministry of Transportation is responsible for foreign airlines departing from Israel; and the Mossad is responsible for thwarting international terrorist threats abroad. This incident — a foreign airline, a foreign pilot — doesn't sit squarely inside any one of those mandates.

Investigators are also examining, though far from conclusively, whether the pilot intended to seize control of the aircraft over Jordanian airspace and crash it somewhere inside Israel shortly after. It's one line of inquiry, not an established finding.

On the broader alert picture: there had been a general uptick in terror-warning traffic, but the dominant concern regarding the Emirates was a different kind of threat altogether — an attack at the airport itself, or a missile strike, the sort of scenario recalled from the 2002 attack in Mombasa targeting Israelis. As far as I know, the specific scenario that played out here — the pilot himself being the attacker — wasn't raised in any prior discussion. That's something that will need to be investigated.