The foiled hijacking of a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv carrying 174 passengers — 166 of them Israelis — on Wednesday has revived the specter of earlier hijackings (mostly attempted) of aircraft bound for Israel, especially during the 1960s and 1970s.

Although associated with the past, Israel still treats such attempts as a current threat. Its flag carrier, El Al, maintains strict security measures, ranging from plainclothes security officers on board, a double-door system to access the cockpit, and extensive passenger interrogations conducted by its own staff at departure airports. If an interrogation raises even the slightest suspicion, some travelers are forced to board stripped of their personal belongings.

The precedents involve planes from that airline, although only the first, in 1968, succeeded. The flight, which operated between Rome and Tel Aviv, departed late due to technical problems with just 38 passengers aboard — seven of them El Al employees or their relatives — and 10 crew members. Near Naples it was hijacked by three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-inspired armed group that forced the aircraft to divert to Algiers. They demanded the release of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails in exchange for the hostages.

Barely 24 hours later, it released the 23 passengers of other nationalities. Later, it freed the 10 women and children. Thus, 12 Israeli men remained as prisoners of the Algerian government (which was technically at war with Israel). Aligned with the Palestinian cause, and in the midst of the Cold War, Algerian authorities eventually demanded the release of all Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

The Israelis who had been hijacked were finally moved to a luxurious villa where they could follow news of the negotiations for their release on radio and in newspapers. Meanwhile, the Israeli military devised a rescue plan under the orders of the famed defense minister, Moshe Dayan. The hijacking lasted 40 days and ended with the release of 16 Palestinian prisoners, a move Israel described as a “humanitarian gesture.”

In 1970 one of the most notorious attempts occurred, notable for the status its perpetrator attained (Leila Khaled, the first woman to hijack a plane) and because she carried it out alongside Patrick Argüello, a member of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas who later helped overthrow the Somoza dictatorship.

Six years later, at the end of June 1976, an Air France plane flying the Tel Aviv–Paris route with a stop in Athens, carrying 248 passengers and 12 crew, was hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and diverted to Entebbe airport in Uganda. After the initial release of non‑Israeli passengers, most of those who remained on board were freed by Israeli commandos in the early hours of July 4. Four passengers were killed, in addition to the hijackers and one Israeli soldier.

Since then, and until this Wednesday, there had been no new hijacking attempts. Largely, that is because security measures at Israeli airports and on Israeli aircraft have increased exponentially decade by decade, unparalleled anywhere else in the world. There have been attempts to attack planes with explosives, or to fire projectiles at aircraft originating from or destined for Israel. But not hijackings.

In 1986, a Syrian intelligence agent tried to blow up a London–Tel Aviv flight using explosives carried — unbeknown to her — by his girlfriend, who was traveling on that flight. Security agents thwarted his plans.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition

The state of Tennessee has ordered a stay on the execution of a woman who was sentenced to death for the murder of a fellow student when she was 18. If it had been carried out as planned on Wednesday, Christa Pike, now 50, would have been be the first woman put to death in the mid-southeastern state in more than two centuries.

A federal appeals court halted Pike’s execution just an hour before it was scheduled to take place. According to the Associated Press, the judges want to review whether the allegations that Pike suffered sexual abuse and rape as a child were taken into account before her death sentence was handed down.

The Tennessee Supreme Court last week denied Pike’s request to stay the execution. Tennessee’s governor, Republican Bill Lee, made the same decision on a petition for clemency on Monday. Pike’s lawyers then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution, but that request was also denied.

The order to stay the execution was issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which reviews decisions by federal courts in Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee. It is unclear whether the state will now appeal to the Supreme Court to review the appellate court’s decision, according to the AP.

Pike was convicted in 1995 of murdering 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a vocational training center for young people in Knoxville, eastern Tennessee. According to the case record, Pike and two other youths, including her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, led Slemmer to a secluded spot, tortured and killed her. The boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison. The other person testified against both and received parole.

According to the Tennessee Supreme Court ruling, Pike told police she believed Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend away from her and initially only wanted to fight with her, but ended up killing her instead.

The ruling says Pike had told a classmate the day before that she was going to kill Slemmer and admitted to police that she struck, kicked and cut the young woman’s throat. Slemmer tried several times to escape the attack, which lasted more than half an hour. Pike said she had hit Slemmer several times in the head with pieces of asphalt. Slemmer died from the head injuries, court documents say.

Pike’s lawyers have asked that her death sentence be replaced with life without parole, arguing she suffered sexual abuse and mental health problems during childhood and adolescence. The defense says the attorneys who represented Pike at trial failed to present evidence of the abuse she endured to the jury.

They also note that seven people, all men, who were sentenced to death in Tennessee for crimes committed at age 18 have had their sentences commuted. No one else that age has been sentenced to death in the state since Pike, 30 years ago.

The abuse history cited by the defense

According to the clemency petition, Pike was the victim of sexual violence in childhood and suffered assaults between the ages of two and five by her grandmother’s boyfriend.

At 11, a neighbor raped her, and Pike reportedly told her mother, who did not believe her, according to a summary of the petition prepared by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI). The neighbor was arrested on charges of indecent acts with a minor but was not jailed. At 17, she was raped again by a stranger, the petition says. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the clemency petition, Pike’s lawyers said her mental health problems prevented her from “stopping herself.” “I was an 18-year-old with a mental illness. It took me many years to even understand the gravity of what I had done. And even longer to accept how many people I affected. I took the life of someone’s daughter, sister, friend. I am now horrified to think I was capable of such a crime,” Pike said in the petition, according to the AP.

According to the DPI, new death sentences for crimes committed by people aged 18 to 20 are rare in the U.S. justice system. In 2005, in Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the death penalty for crimes committed by people under 18. Since then, only 58 death sentences have been imposed for crimes committed before age 21. Between 2020 and 2025 those sentences represented 5% of new death sentences.

Colleen ‘is not with me every day, every hour, every minute’

Slemmer’s mother, May Martínez, had opposed halting the execution and said she would travel from Jacksonville, Florida, where she lives, to witness it. She described her daughter as a happy young woman who liked skating and family games.

“[Colleen] is not with me. She is not with me every day, every hour, every minute,” the mother said in an interview this month with a local station, lamenting that attention on the case has focused on Pike and sidelined her daughter. “It’s as if Colleen never existed,” she said, adding that she hoped the execution would bring some peace to the family.

Pike’s execution would have been the 30th carried out in the U.S. so far this year following the execution on Tuesday in Florida of Curtis Beasley for a 1995 murder.

Florida has carried out 15 executions this year, including two on the same day for the first time since 1964. Last year Florida executed 19 people, nearly half of the 47 executions nationwide. In August, three states carried out executions, including Tennessee — something that had not happened since 2010.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition