Last Friday's hijacking incident at Malta International Airport had an unexpected spill-over effect, with EgyptAir and Israeli newspaper Haaretz having been engaged in a Twitter war after the newspaper falsely reported the hijacked aircraft was an EgyptAir airplane.

The news about the hijacked Libyan plane landing in Malta spread like wildfire in the slow news days before Christmas and Haaretz.com, the digital edition of the Israeli Haaretz newspaper, mistakenly posted news on their twitter account about the plane incident using a picture of an EgyptAir airplane.

The EgyptAir social media team quickly noticed the Haaretz tweets and replied to the false news saying that: "The hijacked aircraft in not an EgyptAir one. If you don't have a photo of the hijacked aircraft, don't use one." 

Haaretz later removed the tweet - after keeping the photo on their website story for over eight hours - and replaced it with a real photo of the Libyan hijacked plane, but without sending an apology to EgyptAir.

EgyptAir's Tweet went viral on Twitter and Facebook.