The flight to Israel that was diverted Wednesday morning after a clash in the cockpit landed safely in Saudi Arabia, a country that Israeli citizens rarely set foot in.
The two nations don’t have formal diplomatic, trade or tourism ties, though attempts to forge them have been central to U.S. regional diplomacy in recent years.
Still, their proximity has taken Israelis to Saudi Arabia under exceptional circumstances.
The 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation, known as the Chicago Convention, laid the foundation for how global civil aviation is governed. It states that all parties to the agreement, which include Israel and Saudi Arabia, should assist aircraft in distress in their territory.
After Wednesday’s emergency landing at the Tabuk airport, a civil-military facility in northwestern Saudi Arabia, the Saudi authorities said that they would provide “necessary care” to passengers. Their statement did not mention the flight’s connection to Israel. The FlyDubai aircraft had been flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv.
In the past few years, at least two other passenger flights en route to Tel Aviv have made emergency landings in Saudi Arabia.
In September 2025, a flight from Dubai landed in the kingdom because of a medical emergency on board, according to a statement by the Israeli Foreign Ministry carried by Israeli news media. The plane then continued on to its destination, according to the statement, which did not say which airline operated the flight or where it landed in Saudi Arabia.
In 2023, an Air Seychelles flight from the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, landed in Jeddah because of a technical malfunction, according to the government-funded Seychelles News Agency. The airport said at the time that roughly 130 passengers were staying at an airport hotel.
In a statement at the time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel thanked the Saudi authorities for their “good neighborliness” and “warm attitude” toward the Israeli passengers.
