A pilot aborted take-off from Tel Aviv airport after passengers received images of plane crashes on their phones.

The messages were pinged over as the Boeing 737 was taxiing to the runway at Ben Gurion Airport, said the BBC.

The captain of the Turkish AnadoluJet decided to abort its take-off when alerted to the incident.

Passengers and crew were taken off and the luggage reinspected.

Several young Israelis were identified as suspects and are being questioned. The plane departed five hours late after being cleared to leave.

Crew had been alerted to the images by several of the 160 passengers onboard.

The Hebrew Ynet news site reported that the images were shared via AirDrop, an Apple service which enables users to send files from one Apple device to another across short distances.

All the images were received on iPhones, it said.

The pictures included images of a Turkish Airlines plane which crashed in the Netherlands in 2009 and another plane crash in the United States in 2013, Ynet said.

The incident comes two weeks after another security scare at Ben Gurion Airport when a family declared at check -in that they’d packed a live artillery shell.