An Israeli mother whose son was killed in the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre has endured another unimaginable ordeal after her daughter survived an attempted hijacking aboard a flydubai flight last week.
“I’m still in shock, but it’s a miracle she’s alive,” Yasmin Ochayon told The Post. “It’s half shock, half joy.”
Miryam Ochayon, 24, had spent nearly a year traveling through Mongolia, India and the Philippines before deciding to return to Israel for the annual memorial honoring her brother, Eviatar.
She was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv on flydubai Flight 1073 on Sept. 30 when the journey turned terrifying. According to Miryam, the Omani co-pilot, Hamam al-Hammami, stabbed the captain, Smit Machchhar, and attempted to crash the aircraft carrying 182 people, most of them Israelis.
As panic spread through the cabin, the plane plunged “out of control,” Miryam told The Post.
In a harrowing video recorded during the chaos, Miryam turned the camera toward herself as passengers screamed around her. Speaking softly, she repeated, “It’s going to be OK – I’m not going to die. I’m going to see my mom.”
She clung to the hands of the two young daughters of fellow passenger Tzvika Manes, who helped restrain the suspect and is credited with helping save everyone aboard the flight.
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Miryam’s repeated words were meant to comfort the frightened girls, but they also helped her maintain control in the middle of the emergency.
“They screamed so strongly that it felt like Oct. 7,” Miryam said. “We were 30 seconds away from crashing, and I knew I had to stay alive for my mother.”
She said she could “feel death in the air” and prayed from her seat to her 22-year-old brother.
“I said to Eviatar, ‘I’m not going to see you up there,’” she recalled. “I’m going to go home and see my mom. If she lost me, she couldn’t go on.”
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Yasmin, a single mother from Jerusalem, had no idea what was happening aboard her daughter’s plane. She was already waiting at Ben Gurion Airport for Miryam’s arrival.
Miryam eventually called her mother after the plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.
“She told me the plane had nearly crashed and that they had come close to dying,” Yasmin said. “To lose a son is crazy, but for this to happen to her too… I couldn’t even imagine that.” The shaken mother said it took several days to absorb what her daughter had experienced.
“I thought, ‘Eviatar watched over us,’” Yasmin said gratefully.
Eviatar was serving as an ambulance driver with the elite Golani unit and was also a gifted artist. On Oct. 7, 2023, he was at the Kissufim military outpost when a Hamas terrorist threw an explosive into a shelter, killing him and five other soldiers. The attack came on what was expected to be his final day of active duty.
Blue-eyed and the eldest of six siblings, Eviatar had a Hebrew name associated with success in life. Miryam remembers him as “the most talented, the most beautiful, the bravest” person, with an “enormous heart.”
At a memorial service last Sunday at Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery, Miryam wept beside her brother’s grave as two of her brothers supported her. She said surviving the flight had taken on special meaning because it allowed her to attend the ceremony.
“I’m not going to die today – I’m going back to my brother’s memorial,” she remembered saying as she stood before grieving relatives and friends, overcome by both relief and sorrow.
“I stood next to him, and I couldn’t believe I was alive. It felt like a miracle,” she said.
“I know Eviatar played an incredible part in this,” she said at the packed memorial.
“I’m standing here, looking at your grave,” she said as her brothers comforted her at the memorial, “and not looking at you from above.”
Meanwhile, Yasmin went alone to her son’s grave on Oct. 7 this year for a private moment.
“Every year is hard, but emotionally it was different this year,” she said. “God took my son, but he gave me back my daughter,” Yasmin said. “He took life and gave life. We feel the miracle.”
