The Free Press

Israel averted tragedy Wednesday morning when passengers aboard a plane bound for Tel Aviv thwarted an attempted hijacking by the co-pilot, a suspected terrorist. In an exclusive interview with The Free Press, one of those passengers, Yaniv Hayoun, describes how he stormed the cockpit.

The attempted hijacking is a reminder that Israel’s enemies don’t rest and never fail to surprise. But as the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks approaches, Douglas Murray writes to remind us how often, and how thoroughly, Israelis have overmatched those enemies. Despite constant trials, Douglas writes, the past three years have been a triumph. —Mene Ukueberuwa

The attempted hijacking of a Flydubai plane en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv brings back memories of many other attacks. The bravery of the crew and passengers who overwhelmed the pilot-terrorist brings to mind the heroism of the American passengers on United Flight 93. The targeting of a plane full of Israeli passengers recalls the spate of plane hijackings that haunted the 1970s. But most of all, the attack—and the successful averting of what could have been a mass-casualty terrorist event—is a reminder of something bigger: that Israel and the West remain at war with Islamic radicals, and that it is a war we are winning.

To some people, this reflection might seem counterintuitive. Each day’s news is filled with declarations of defeat. The online world is filled with shrill declarations that Israel has lost this war.

But as we approach the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, I stand by what I wrote here this time last year: that Israel and her allies have been winning the war on the ground even as they have lost the PR war around the world. The PR war matters. But it matters less than the war itself. Better to win the ground war and lose the PR war than the other way around.

Around 8:20 a.m. local time on Wednesday morning, a flight bound from Dubai to Tel Aviv sent out an emergency signal, alerting Israeli air traffic controllers to an attempted hijacking. One of the co-pilots had repeatedly stabbed the other with a knife, before seizing control of the cockpit. Within two minutes, the plane had plummeted more than 17,000 feet, careening off course toward Saudi Arabia. About 180 people were on board.

Moments later, several passengers and crewmembers stormed the cockpit after the injured pilot, Smit Machchhar, managed to fight back and open the door. They then overpowered the attacker and took back control of the plane, landing it in Saudi Arabia. At 6:34 p.m. local time, everyone on board arrived safely back in Tel Aviv.

I spoke with Yaniv Hayoun, a passenger on the plane, immediately after he landed. Hayoun was one of the people who stormed the cockpit.

It’s Wednesday, September 30, and for the first time in over 20 years, someone has tried to hijack a plane bound for Israel. Miraculously, the attacker, an Omani pilot, was overpowered before he could seemingly crash the aircraft.

The entire region held its breath as the morning Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv sent an emergency signal, transmitted the hijack code and appeared to veer off course over Saudi Arabia. The region then exhaled, almost with a chuckle, when early reports blamed a scuffle between the two pilots. That laughter quickly died as security assessments and passenger testimony revealed that the co-pilot had repeatedly stabbed the captain before seizing the controls and pointing the plane toward the ground, dropping more than 17,000 feet in just over a minute, until several crew members and passengers forced their way through the cockpit door and subdued him. Many were injured in the process. The plane made an emergency landing in Tabuk, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, where the passengers are now waiting for Israel to bring them home.

The assailant’s specific motive and affiliation are still unconfirmed, but Israel is treating the incident as terrorism.

One of my favorite comedies of all time is Airplane!, but there’s a reason Israel doesn’t make comedies about crises in the air. Between 1968 and 1976, Palestinian groups attempted or carried out 16 hijackings, and roughly as many attacks on other aviation targets, hitting El Al offices and passengers at the airports in Athens, Brussels, Istanbul, and Rome. An El Al jet flying the Israeli flag was an unmistakable national symbol and a target. The defining image of the era was an isolated El Al plane, Magen David (Star of David) on its tail, sitting on a foreign tarmac, its window shades drawn, surrounded by police and soldiers, while hostage negotiations dragged on for days. The aim of the terrorists was to isolate Israel, reach a global audience, and strike fear into Israelis, and it succeeded on all three counts.

It’s Wednesday, September 30. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Jed Rubenfeld on whether President Trump’s recent moves violate the law. The problem with New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plans to fight antisemitism. Aaron MacLean on why time is running out for Iran. And much more.

But first: how the GOP struck back against MAHA.

The movement to Make America Healthy Again may soon go the way of punk rock. It was supposed to crash into Washington like a wrecking ball, toppling the corporate interests that its activists claim have poisoned our food and pushed dangerous chemicals and drugs.

Instead, it seems like the corporate crowd has taken over—at least by the looks of the MAHA Summit held on Tuesday. Our Washington correspondent Audrey Fahlberg dropped by to see it firsthand, and watched MAHA leader Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rubbing elbows with representatives of the business elite, from Walmart to Anthropic.

It’s the latest sign of the long struggle over MAHA within the Trump administration. Audrey also sat down with Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency and a key player in deciding which MAHA demands will turn into policy. Zeldin, a traditional pro-business Republican, says there’s a divide within the MAHA movement—between the serious reformers and minor influencers who have jumped on board “for clicks or relevancy, to gain following or fortune.”

As big businesses and libertarian-minded Republicans strike back, is there any future for MAHA’s more radical proposals, such as stricter restrictions on possible toxins in a popular weed killer? Read Audrey’s report to see where things are heading. —Mene Ukueberuwa

• In an emergency order Tuesday, the Supreme Court let the Trump administration restart quick deportations of illegal migrants to nations where they aren’t citizens, overriding a lower court ruling that required deportees be given a chance to object first. The administration says it has already sent more than 25,000 people to these so-called third countries, and the justices will hear full arguments on the policy in December.

• President Trump hosted close to 20 tech leaders at the White House on Tuesday and signed a nonbinding agreement to have their AI systems checked by in-house teams, external auditors, and their own boards. The president called the deal “morally binding,” and said that he plans to pick a new AI czar in the coming days. He said the group agreed AI firms should rely on “tremendous self-regulation,” despite growing calls for federal oversight.

• Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer argued yesterday that there’s no proof she killed her three young children and asked a judge to acquit her. It’s a sharp departure from the argument made at her trial, which ended in a hung jury earlier this month, where the defense never disputed that Clancy caused the deaths and instead argued she was not criminally responsible because of her alleged mental illness.

• ICE aims to hire 5,000 more people by the end of the year, to support Trump’s deportation campaign. The move would grow the agency’s workforce by about 17 percent on top of the roughly 8,000 employees it has added since the president took office.

• Former Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem filed for divorce from her husband, Byron, after more than 30 years of marriage, citing irreconcilable differences. The filing comes months after reports surfaced of his online exchanges with fetish models.

• The FBI urged members of ShinyHunters, a global hacking and extortion group, to come forward, days after the group claimed it had breached an FBI website and stolen agents’ personal data. The warning followed an announcement by Dutch authorities that they had arrested one of the group’s suspected leaders earlier this month.

• Former special counsel Jack Smith, who led the Justice Department’s two prosecutions of Trump during the Joe Biden administration, told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday that partisanship played no part in the cases. Republicans argue Smith violated the Constitution in his far-reaching investigation. But GOP senator Eric Schmitt saw his accusations of perjury against Smith quickly fall apart after Schmitt appeared to confuse two different sports teams.

Washington, D.C., is a “tough” and “toxic” place,” wellness advocate Calley Means, a senior aide to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., told the crowd of wellness activists, healthcare industry executives, and lobbyists gathered for this year’s second annual Make America Healthy Again Summit. “But,” he said, “I am more optimistic today than I’ve ever been” about “evangelizing the chronic disease crisis” and promoting the future of this nascent coalition, which was founded in 2024 with a bone to pick against pesticides, processed foods, and chemical and pharmaceutical companies.

Many MAHA activists wish they could say the same. Held on Tuesday at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, this year’s summit is pitched as a confab for those taking up “the work of a healthier America.” Yet a glance at the speaker agenda and sponsorship list revealed that the event was populated by the type of healthcare giants and start-up founders who dominated the field long before RFK Jr.’s movement seized Washington, from fitness tracker Oura to Walmart and Anthropic. (The event’s organizers rescinded press invites to a string of mainstream and conservative journalists.) The summit was the latest battleground in the struggle over the MAHA movement between its most avid activists and the pro-business wing of the Republican Party.

Caught in the movement’s crosshairs is Lee Zeldin, the former New York congressman who now leads Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.

For Zeldin, who sat for an interview with The Free Press during a recent swing through New York, there are two camps of MAHA activists.

One camp consists of “people who seek to use the coalition to try to advance a cause [and] that you could tell in the way they engage in rhetoric and tactics that they don’t support President Trump,” Zeldin told me, “whether it’s for clicks or relevancy, to gain following or fortune.” That’s code for leftists, armchair experts, social-media influencers, and grifters.

There he goes again.

Or at least that’s what the media is saying about President Donald Trump, whom they have recently accused of blatantly violating the law in three different ways. First, the president is planning to send Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to polling stations. Second, he’s running political ads paid for with U.S. government money. And third, he’s still trying to deport poor Mahmoud Khalil, the Hamas sympathizer who this week published—in the words of The New York Times—his “shattering memoir” of a man “detained . . . for his beliefs.”

When Trump is clearly violating the law, I’ve said so, as I did just last week about his attempt to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House press briefings. But in these three matters, he probably has the law on his side. Let’s take a look at them, one at a time.

On Tuesday, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani released his administration’s $7.4 million “Strategy to Combat Antisemitism.” It will be, the mayor said in a video released on Instagram, “a road map for how our administration will confront the scourge of antisemitism now and in the future.”

If you read the report, you’ll find that it has plenty to say about celebrating Jewish New Yorkers. The problem is that it has almost nothing to say about combating—or even identifying—the movement that has made them afraid.

Time is not on Iran’s side. While much could still happen to disrupt America’s progress in the war, the Iran strategy being pursued by the Donald Trump administration has given it the upper hand over Tehran.

You can see signs of that momentum in all three parts of the administration’s strategy: the blockade of Iranian ports, expanded sanctions, and escort operations in the Strait of Hormuz.

Imposing the blockade back in April was President Trump’s best decision of the war. He briefly lifted the blockade as part of the memorandum of understanding (MOU), a mistake that allowed Iran to benefit from a significant influx of cash, but the blockade again appears to be completely effective.

Iran used to export about two million barrels of oil per day through the Strait of Hormuz. Today, the number is zero, not to mention all the other commodities that moved in or out of Iran by sea before the war.

Blockade work-arounds by Iran such as shipping oil by truck likely amount to tens of thousands of barrels a day, a meager fraction. And the supply of Iranian oil for sale aboard ships located outside the blockade, led by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) commander Admiral Brad Cooper, is dwindling fast. That supply will hit zero at some point in the coming weeks, cutting off yet another source of cash for the regime.

In a world where matters of the heart and hormones are among the most turbulent fronts in the culture wars, new traditions must be established to cope with the ongoing conflict. Hence, our annual (except in some cases, it’s more like seasonal) ritual, wherein a murky unpleasant sexual encounter between two or more consenting-or-were-they adults becomes the pressure release valve for all our pent-up frustrations about the increasingly fraught landscape of affairs between the sexes.

This time, the encounter in question took place in 2024 at upstate New York’s Cornell University, at the off-campus home of the fraternity Chi Phi. According to a statement given at the time by the alleged victim—identified only as Jane Doe—it all began around 11 p.m., after she left a sorority meetup and walked a mile or so to the Chi Phi frat house, to meet up with a male friend who lived there. Once there, she continued drinking and also took ketamine, until the friend suggested they have group sex with one of his fraternity brothers. Jane Doe agreed—per her statement, she was “pretty okay with having this threesome” as well as titillated by the possibility that the two men might be sexually attracted to each other—but the encounter ended when both men proved too drunk to perform. Her friend lost his erection and fell asleep; the other man started dry heaving.

But then a third man entered the room—and eventually, a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.

That’s the question everyone is asking themselves, as it seems like every week there’s something new: moms clad in pink showing up in sympathy for Lindsay Clancy, the latest outrage over a scandalous Sydney Sweeney ad, or even something as ubiquitous as the rise of fashionable therapy terms like gaslighting, narcissism, and trauma.

As our screen time has…