Israel has barred airline crews holding citizenship from 31 countries from its airspace, a restriction imposed after an attempted hijacking of a flydubai aircraft.

The measure, reported by the Deccan Herald, marks an unusual widening of aviation security screening from individual suspects to entire nationalities of crew members. Israel has not, according to the report, publicly detailed the full list of the 31 affected nations.

The attempted hijack involved a flydubai flight. The Dubai-based low-cost carrier operates an all-737 fleet and flies regularly to Tel Aviv, a route that has grown steadily since the Abraham Accords opened Gulf–Israeli commercial links in 2020.

What does the ban change?

Crew nationality restrictions of this breadth are rare in commercial aviation. States typically screen flight crews through security vetting, airline rosters and airport access controls rather than passport-of-origin rules.

A 31-country exclusion touches the core of airline workforce planning. Carriers serving Israel from the Gulf, South Asia and beyond draw cockpit and cabin crews from precisely the multinational labor pools such a ban would restrict. Rostering around it means either reallocating crews by passport or adjusting frequencies — both of which carry cost.

The ban does not, on the face of the report, close Israeli airspace to the airlines themselves. It targets who may work a flight into that airspace.

Why flydubai is the trigger

The hijack attempt on the flydubai service is the incident at the center of the decision. The carrier has not commented in the source material, and Israeli authorities have not specified when the attempt occurred or how it was interrupted.

For flydubai, the exposure is direct. The airline's Tel Aviv route sits inside a network built on point-to-point Gulf connections, and crew constraints on that route ripple into aircraft rotation across the wider schedule.

Other operators into Ben Gurion Airport face the same arithmetic if they employ crew from the listed nations.

What comes next

The open questions are the duration of the ban, the mechanism for exemptions, and whether Israel's regulator formalizes the rule into standing aviation security policy. Until the list of 31 nations and the enforcement date are published, airlines will be forced to plan conservatively around who can legally crew a flight to Tel Aviv.