Operation Thunderbolt — The Entebbe Rescue

The Hijacking

On 27 June 1976, Air France Flight 139 departed Tel Aviv for Paris via Athens. Shortly after the Athens stopover, four hijackers seized the aircraft: two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-EO) and two members of the German Revolutionäre Zellen — Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann. The plane was diverted to Benghazi for refueling, then flown to Entebbe, Uganda, where Idi Amin's regime welcomed the hijackers and provided military reinforcement. Several additional operatives joined them there.

The captors proceeded to separate Israeli citizens and Jewish passengers from the rest and confine them in the old terminal building. Non-Jewish passengers were released in stages; approximately 106 people remained: Israelis and the Air France crew who refused to leave their passengers. The selection was not lost on those who lived through it. A Holocaust survivor reportedly showed hijacker Böse the camp number tattooed on his arm. Böse protested that he was no Nazi — an idealist. The distinction offered little comfort to people who had been sorted by nationality and ethnicity at gunpoint.

The Planning

Israel's response was built on intelligence and rehearsal, not improvisation. The Mossad extensively interviewed passengers released in Paris. Israeli intelligence consulted Solel Boneh, the construction firm whose workers had built the terminal, obtaining architectural blueprints. The IDF erected a partial replica of the airport structure and drilled Sayeret Matkal — Israel's elite special reconnaissance unit, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu — through every phase of the assault. Four C-130 Hercules transports were loaded, flight-planned, and rehearsed for a round-trip of over 4,000 kilometres.

The Raid

The aircraft landed at Entebbe late on 3 July 1976. A black Mercedes and Land Rovers — a deliberate deception mimicking Idi Amin's motorcade — led the assault column toward the terminal. The fighting was brief and ferocious. All seven hijackers and approximately 45 Ugandan soldiers were killed. The assault phase lasted roughly 30 minutes; the entire ground operation was completed in approximately 53 minutes before the C-130s lifted off.

One hundred and two hostages were rescued. The costs were precise and irreversible. Jean-Jacques Maimoni, a 19-year-old French immigrant to Israel, was shot by commandos who mistook him for a hijacker. Pasco Cohen, 52, was mortally wounded in the crossfire. Ida Borochovitch, 56, was killed by a hijacker. Yonatan Netanyahu — the operation's ground commander — was shot by Ugandan forces and died before he could be evacuated. He was 30 years old.

Dora Bloch, 73, had been transferred before the raid to Mulago Hospital in Kampala after choking on food. She was not among those rescued. On Idi Amin's orders, officers of the Ugandan Army dragged her from her hospital bed and killed her. Her body was found in 1979 by Tanzanian soldiers near a sugar plantation outside Kampala. She was buried in Jerusalem.

The Case For and Against

The case for providence rests on the improbability of the compound outcome: a 4,000-kilometre clandestine flight, a night landing, a 30-minute assault against a reinforced position, and 102 people alive. At each node — detection during approach, a panicked hostage, a different guard rotation — the operation could have ended in massacre. Providential readings in the Jewish community hold that what looked impossible was made possible; that a people standing again at a selection were delivered.

The case for natural explanation is stronger. The success followed directly from what the IDF spent the preceding week constructing: exact blueprints, a full-scale mock-up, exhaustive rehearsal, surprise, and overwhelming force concentrated into a very short window. Each element that looks miraculous has a traceable human cause. What remains after the natural explanation is not magic — it is the genuine, compressible margin between preparation and chance, the honest acknowledgment that even the best planning cannot guarantee the outcome, and that this time, for 102 people, it held. For four others it did not.