The flight was carrying 174 people, the vast majority of whom were Israeli adults and children. The real intentions of the criminal network behind yesterday's terrorist attack are far from being fully clarified, but the Israeli security services today have no doubts regarding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have faced catastrophic political fallout—and likely an overwhelming defeat in the upcoming October 27, 2026, legislative elections—if Israeli air defenses had shot down the flydubai flight yesterday.
Some objective facts are already taken for granted. A state-ordered downing of a civilian airliner filled with its own citizens would be a historical tragedy. The domestic fury and grief would rest squarely on the shoulders of the sitting government. Bibi's political career would have ended forever and Likud itself would probably take years to recover from the shock.
If that plane had flown blindly into Israeli airspace and been shot down by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) under Hostile-Target Protocol, the domestic and international consequences would have completely reshaped the election campaign. The opposition's narrative that Netanyahu is incapable of providing basic security to Israelis would have become an unassailable campaign reality.
Even with the disaster successfully averted in reality, opposition leaders like Gadi Eisenkot immediately seized on the incident as a reminder of systemic security failures and civilians being forced to fend for themselves.
The direct flights between Tel Aviv and Dubai are a crown jewel of the 2020 Abraham Accords, a normalization agreement that Netanyahu frequently claims as a major personal foreign policy triumph. Shooting down an Emirati state-owned carrier would have triggered a severe diplomatic crisis with the UAE, completely dismantling one of his primary political achievements just weeks before voters head to the polls.
