Netanyahu asks Captain Machchhar and Modi to light Israel's Independence Day flame

Benjamin Netanyahu has invited Captain Smit Machchhar, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to light a celebratory flame on Israel's next Independence Day. He made the offer on a call on Saturday, ETV Bharat reported, and called the Indian pilot "a true hero of the brave peoples of India and Israel" and "a hero of the entire world." He wished Machchhar a full recovery.

The flight was Flydubai FZ1073, Dubai to Tel Aviv, on 30 September. Machchhar told Netanyahu the sector had been ordinary until the co-pilot, who had said he wanted to pray, struck him. "It was a normal flight, and he wanted to pray, which is not out of the ordinary. While he was praying, out of respect, I was looking at the front, not at the back, and suddenly there was a big blow to the back of my head," he said. His first thought was that the aircraft had taken catastrophic damage. The blows continued, and he realised the other man in the cockpit was the source.

NewsDrum carried a longer reconstruction from the same call. Machchhar said that, badly injured and struggling to see, he still had to get the cockpit door open for people waiting outside. "I had that one last fight left in me," he said. The line he gave Netanyahu for that moment was: "If I don't do it, I'm going to die." The aircraft had begun a sharp descent. He did not, in the published account, give the lowest altitude or the number of blows.

Netanyahu called the sequence "a twist of fate" and "a twist of faith." He said he had also heard from Israeli passengers about what happened after the door opened, and he stressed that the captain had not acted alone once help could enter. He mentioned a dentist who had treated Machchhar and who had described him as exceedingly brave. Machchhar's reply was that the doctor had saved his life. Netanyahu said that together, the captain and the people who reached him had saved many lives.

The co-pilot has been described in Indian reports as Omani. Those reports tie the attack to what they call a terrorist attempt to crash an Israel-bound flight. The cockpit account Machchhar gave on the call is a first-person sequence: prayer, a blow to the back of the head, repeated blows, a descent, a last attempt on the door. A court record, a charge sheet and the co-pilot's name were not in the ETV Bharat or NewsDrum accounts of the call. The invitation to the Independence Day ceremony does not fill that gap. It treats the outcome as settled.

Israel's Independence Day next falls in late April 2027, on the Hebrew calendar date that moves each spring. Lighting a torch, or a flame, at the official ceremony on Mount Herzl is a state invitation, usually extended to soldiers, rescuers and civilians the government wants to mark. Extending it to a foreign captain, and pairing him with a foreign prime minister, is a diplomatic act as well as a personal one. Modi has not publicly replied in the reports of the call. The invitation was made to Machchhar, with Modi named as the other guest.

Machchhar is still recovering. The published conversation does not give a hospital, a discharge date or the injuries beyond the blows to the head and the trouble seeing. The operational residue of FZ1073 sits with Flydubai, with Emirati and Israeli investigators, and with whatever case is opened against the co-pilot. None of that procedure was described on the call Netanyahu held on Saturday.

What the call does fix is the Israeli government's public line: the captain is to be honoured on the next Independence Day, Modi is asked to stand with him, and the cockpit account Machchhar gave is the account Jerusalem is using. The altitude, the door, and the legal case remain outside that conversation.