By Patrick Mathangani
With guns blazing, dozens of commandos burst into the room packed with terrified hostages.
"Stay down! Stay down! We are Israeli soldiers," they yelled in Hebrew.
"Don’t be afraid. We are here."
The seven Palestinian and German terrorists holding the hostages captive were bewildered by the sudden, unexpected intrusion. The Israelis had practiced this moment again and again, and the element of total surprise worked perfectly.
Dazed terrorists sprung for their guns, firing randomly, in confusion. All seven were felled in less than a minute of a fierce gunfight, along with three hostages.
The commandos, members of the Israel defence forces, then herded the 102 hostages out and onto waiting planes.
It was on the night of July 3 and 4, 1976, exactly 34 years ago today. The scene of the daring rescue was Entebbe Airport, Uganda.
After 53-minutes of adrenalin packed action on the ground, the planes took off to Nairobi, re-fuelled, and were soon airborne enroute to Israel.
Major General Doron Almog of Israel’s defence forces |
Before they could land in Israel, the news had spread across the globe and the world was awash with excitement over what the soldiers had accomplished some 2,500 miles away from home.
Today, The Standard on Saturday pieces together events of that night with first-hand accounts of what transpired in the operation that will long remain etched in the annals of history.
Flight 139
Enquiries also reveal Kenya was deeply involved in assisting the Israelis, and the country was soon drawn into an international crisis that almost brought it to war with then Uganda President Idi Amin.
Given proximity to Uganda, Nairobi came as a safe haven for co-ordinating the rescue, with Mossad –– Israel’s secret service –– which mounting a major operation to gather intelligence on Ugandans. This would prove crucial in the unprecedented raid.
The drama had started a week earlier on June 27 when three gun-waving Palestinian terrorists hijacked Air France Flight 139, an Airbus A300 mid-air. The terrorists were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and had boarded the plane during a stopover in Athens, Greece.
The plane, carrying 260 people on board, first stopped in Libya and eventually landed at Entebbe. Here, four others joined the terrorists.
Among their demands was the release of 40 Palestinians held in Israel jails and 13 others in West Germany, France, Switzerland, and Kenya.
The world waited with bated breath as the terrorists gave a deadline of July 1. If the demands were not met, they would start executing the hostages.
There were few options. The Palestinian terrorists were spreading terror across the globe by targeting Israel’s interests.
As the crisis unfolded, Amin sent his soldiers to keep watch over the airport’s old terminal, where the hostages were being held.
"Most were infantrymen in the army –soldiers on foot – and were not ready for an attack. Nobody expected a rescue unit to hit that night," recalls Suleman Dehiya, then a private in Uganda’s air force.
On the night of the rescue, Dehiya was stationed near the Air Force hangar, just a stone’s throw from the terminal where the hostages were being held. His unit, however, had no brief to guard the hostages.
Back in Israel, top military leaders mooted a plan to rescue the hostages, even as such action was being seen as too risky. In the early days of the plan, the terrorists made what turned out as a fatal mistake – they released non-Jew hostages and put then on a plane to France.
For Israel’s military strategists, this was godsend.
"We interrogated some of the non-Jews that were flown to Paris four days before the operation. We also did some classified intelligence operation that were taken by Israeli special agents two days before the operation," Major General Doron Almog of Israel’s defence forces told The Standard On Saturday. Almog was among the first to land at Entebbe and he remembers the tensions of the night and the challenge of a military operation in an environment many had never visited before.
As is the case in hostage crisis, Israel offered to negotiate with the terrorists to buy more time to fine tune the rescue plan. Generals and diplomats were in touch with Amin, but it increasingly became clear he was on the side of the terrorists.
To give more time for negotiations, the terrorists extended the deadline to July 4. It also turned out the airport had been built by an Israeli construction company, hence making it easy to access the building plan.
The blueprints were the best tools the Israeli forces had against the terrorists.
The interrogations established the terrorists, as well as Ugandan soldiers, had little concern about an attack and least expected it. In any case, negotiations were going on between Amin and Israel officials, including the then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Yigal Alon.
Best laid plan
It was a race against time. The clock was ticking toward the second deadline, and the Israeli’s had no current aerial photographs of the airport. Nothing was being left to chance.
The military men turned to Mossad, the secret agency that had established a good network in Nairobi.
A Mossad agent hired a private small plane and over flew the airport, clicking away his camera before heading back to Nairobi. The film had to be sent to Israel for processing and fast.
Armed with this information, several options were put on the table, including flying in paratroopers who would be dropped into Lake Victoria with inflatable rubber boats.
But, Almog says, this option was not ideal, as the operation required a simple, smooth and straightforward method.
The planners settled on a plan to fly four planes into Entebbe at night, laden with elite squads. They would carry the men, a black Mercedes Benz resembling Amin’s, a number of jeeps and armoured cars.
The limo was a decoy to give the impression that Amin who was on a foreign trip, was returning home. The plan was finalised in the early morning of July 3 and was soon approved by the Israeli Cabinet.
Holding their breath, the squads of about 100 battle-hardened men left the Sinai, where they had been rehearsing for the onslaught. ‘Operation Thunderbolt’, as it was codenamed, was now underway.
It demanded sheer guts, but it was worth the gamble.
