Between August 2023 and September 2026, two Israeli flights made emergency landings in Saudi Arabia — Air Seychelles HM22 at Jiddah and Flydubai FZ1073 at Tabuk. Both aircraft were received, both crews cared for, and both sets of passengers departed without detention. Saudi Arabia and Israel have no diplomatic relations.
Jiddah, 2023: The Accidental Precedent
A hotel room in Jiddah is not, on its face, a diplomatic instrument. On the night of August 28, 2023, it became one anyway. Air Seychelles flight HM22, inbound to Tel Aviv from the Seychelles, diverted to King Abdulaziz International Airport after an electrical failure — and 128 Israeli citizens found themselves on Saudi soil, hosted overnight in an airport hotel, in a bilateral relationship that does not formally exist.
The transit lasted roughly 16 hours. Air Seychelles flew in a replacement aircraft the following day and the passengers reached Ben Gurion on August 29. Nothing in that sequence required a diplomatic agreement; everything in it required one to function.
Saudi civil aviation authorities coordinated the landing, arranged accommodation, and handed the passengers back without incident — a chain of decisions that no communiqué had authorised and no treaty governed.
Benjamin Netanyahu then did something precise. He issued a rare public thank-you to Saudi authorities — praising their response to Israeli passengers in distress, without once naming a relationship that does not exist. The formulation was careful to the point of being architectural: gratitude for a specific act, silence about its implications.
That silence was load-bearing. The normalization talks being mediated by Washington in the summer of 2023 were at a delicate stage, and the public record of Jiddah 2023 was worth preserving without being named too loudly.
A ledger entry, not a treaty — but ledger entries accumulate, and three years later the accounting would come due at Tabuk.
Tabuk, 2026: The Test Without a Script
On September 30, 2026, Flydubai flight FZ1073, en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv, diverted to Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, after the captain and first officer came to blows in the cockpit. During the altercation, a Squawk 7500 signal — the international hijacking alert — was transmitted from the aircraft. Israel scrambled warplanes in response.
The flight dropped 17,000 feet before stabilising. Both pilots were hospitalised at Tabuk airport. Some Israeli officials characterised the incident as a suspected terror attempt, though the specific cause of the fight remains uninvestigated in the public record.
The 2023 Jiddah landing was a technical failure with a known script: electrical fault, emergency protocol, overnight hotel, replacement aircraft. Tabuk had no such script.
A hijacking flag activated the military layer of the relationship, not only the civil aviation layer, and Saudi controllers had to process a distress call that Israeli warplanes were already treating as a security event. That is a materially different stress test.
What held is the structural fact that Tabuk's controllers did not turn the aircraft away. The passengers were not detained. Medical care was administered to both crews on Saudi soil. The informal channel that the 2023 incident suggested existed — between controllers, between military liaisons, between someone and someone in Riyadh and Tel Aviv — appears to have carried the load when the signal was not a fault code but a hijack squawk.
The gap between formal and functional diplomacy has rarely been more compressed. Saudi Arabia and Israel maintain no diplomatic relations. They share, apparently, a frequency.
Ask the small question first: who is the borderland here, and who is the empire? In this corridor, in this register, both states chose the same answer — get the plane down — and the bureaucratic distance that separated them in every other forum did not move the aircraft one degree off its approach.
How a Four-Digit Code Overrides the Israel-Saudi Non-Relationship
Squawk 7500 is not a request. A crew that dials it onto the transponder is broadcasting a hijack alert, and every air traffic control facility along the flight path is obligated to respond — not by diplomatic courtesy, but by the framework of the Chicago Convention and the operational rules that bind its signatories.
Saudi Arabia is a signatory. Israel is a signatory. The code fires the protocol before any ministry can form an opinion.
Saudi Arabia opened its airspace to all commercial carriers, including Israeli-flagged aircraft, in 2022. That decision was framed cautiously at the time — a logistical adjustment, not a recognition. But operational consequences do not wait for diplomatic framing to catch up. Once Israeli carriers can overfly Saudi territory as a matter of routine, the infrastructure of coordination quietly follows: frequencies, procedures, the ordinary machinery of shared skies.
The speed of the Saudi medical and military coordination at Tabuk — ground services, hospitalisation of both pilots, orderly handling of a vessel broadcasting a hijack alert — implies communication channels that predate the emergency by some distance. Improvisation does not move that fast. Pre-existing contact does.
This is the structural point that ministerial communiqués consistently obscure. Sovereignty overflight rights and emergency landing protocols constitute a parallel diplomatic architecture, one built on aeronautical convention rather than ministerial assent.
It does not require recognition. It requires only that both states signed the same convention and operate the same frequencies. The relationship, such as it is, runs through the controller's headset, not the foreign minister's office.
The relationship, such as it is, runs through the controller's headset, not the foreign minister's office.
Formal Recognition and Its Absent Architecture
One hundred and sixty-nine of the one hundred and ninety-two UN member states recognise Israel, as of February 2026. That figure sounds like a solid foundation. It is not. Recognition is a legal declaration, not an operational network, and the map of who grants it correlates only loosely with who will, in practice, answer the phone at three in the morning when a transponder turns red over the Hejaz.
The Abraham Accords normalised Israel's relationship with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. Saudi Arabia stayed outside that framework, deliberately. Riyadh's price was always higher: a pathway toward Palestinian statehood, security guarantees from Washington, a civilian nuclear programme.
The Biden administration was brokering exactly those terms when Air Seychelles HM22 put a hundred and twenty-eight Israeli citizens down at King Abdulaziz International Airport in August 2023. The Jiddah landing was therefore not merely a technical event. It was a data point that both parties could read without having to name — proof that functional cooperation was already running beneath the formal silence.
Neither side named it publicly. Netanyahu thanked the Saudi authorities for their "warm attitude," a phrase calibrated to acknowledge without obligating. The Saudis said nothing at all, which was its own kind of statement.
Three days before the Tabuk diversion, on September 27, 2026, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar cancelled the diplomatic status of Dutch diplomats in Ramallah. Formal channels were tightening in one corridor while informal ones were about to be tested in another.
The two events are not connected by any logic except the logic of timing, which is sometimes enough to clarify the shape of a system: the architecture of formal diplomacy was contracting, and the architecture of functional cooperation was, three days later, asked to hold.
It held. What remains open is whether holding under pressure constitutes building, or whether it is simply not yet failing.
The Marker That Will Tell Us Whether This Was a Detour or a Road
Two incidents, three years apart. In 2023, electrical failure; in 2026, a cockpit fight and a squawk 7500. Both aircraft landed on Saudi soil.
Both crews received medical attention. Both sets of Israeli passengers departed without detention. The pattern is thin, but it is a pattern.
The comparison that flatters this story is the one where two emergency landings become the quiet scaffolding of a functional relationship. The comparison that sobers it is simpler: Saudi Arabia handled a distress call because distress calls require handling, and operational competence is not the same as political commitment. What the 2023 Air Seychelles landing and the 2026 Flydubai diversion share is that neither forced Riyadh to choose between aviation protocol and domestic solidarity with Palestinian positions.
The load-bearing question is whether Saudi Civil Aviation Authority cooperation survives precisely that scenario — a third incident, perhaps with casualties, arriving in a week when the Gaza ledger demands a visible Saudi response.
Netanyahu's public thank-you after the 2023 Jiddah landing was a diplomatic signal dressed as courtesy. What followed it was silence — no joint statement, no parallel procedural communiqué, nothing from either civil aviation authority that could be pointed to as the shape of a working arrangement.
That silence is the baseline. Watch for whether the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority and its Israeli counterparts issue any shared or parallel language on the Tabuk investigation — even a sentence of anodyne procedural coordination. If they do, two Israeli emergency landings in Saudi Arabia built something permanent. If they revert to separate silence, the infrastructure was always borrowed, and the road was always someone else's.
