pecific warning.

U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that he and Netanyahu discussed the incident  at length  by phone and it seemed as though the copilot  was perhaps a terrorist or perhaps a whack job. 

Netanyahu said he also spoke with the UAE's president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who agreed that Israel would join the interrogation of the suspect.

Netanyahu had warned in recent days of unspecified, heightened security threats. The country is a week away from the anniversary of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which has triggered the war in Gaza.

Israel's foreign ministry said the people on board were from Israel, India and the UAE. The U.S. State Department said four passengers had American citizenship.

FlyDubai has said its flights to and from Israel would be suspended.

School where captain trained calls the safe landing  miraculous'

In the chaos that unfolded about two and a half hours after leaving Dubai, the flight descended from 33,000 feet to 17,000 feet (around 10,000 meters to 5,100 meters) in about a minute, before making an erratic circle close to the Jordanian border and landing Tabuk about an hour later, according to Flightradar24, which identified the aircraft as a Boeing 737 Max 8.

The head of the New Zealand flight school where the Indian captain trained, Philip Kean, called it  miraculous in the way that the airplane was never, ever kind of designed for that sort of dive and survive that, the airplane actually didn't break up completely. 

Already, Trump was praising the U.S.-based Boeing for producing a plane  that was able to withstand G Forces and Strain far beyond what it was designed. 

During the frantic search for a place to land, a person who heard the flight's communications with air traffic control described the plane being turned away by Saudi Arabia and Jordan before eventually landing in Tabuk, while passengers screamed in the background. The pilot's voice was trembling as he called  mayday  and said a hijacking was taking place.

The air control operators gave no reason for the refusals. The person who heard the communications spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

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Associated Press writer Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.