It is just before midnight on 3 July 1976, and the first of four Israeli C-130 Hercules is rolling out on a darkened runway at Entebbe Airport, deep inside Idi Amin’s Uganda. The ramp drops, and out rolls a black Mercedes flanked by Land Rovers — a fake presidential motorcade, meant to carry Israeli commandos to the terminal before anyone realises the aircraft did not belong there.

Inside the old terminal building, more than a hundred hostages from a hijacked airliner are being held at gunpoint. Leading the assault is Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu. Within ninety minutes almost all of them will be free, the hijackers dead, and the Hercules climbing back into the African night — but Yoni will not be coming home.

A hijacking and an impossible distance

On 27 June 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a German revolutionary group, and flown to Entebbe in Uganda. There, under the protection of dictator Idi Amin, the hijackers released the non-Israeli passengers and held roughly a hundred Israeli and Jewish hostages, threatening to kill them. Entebbe lay some 4,000 kilometres from Israel — far beyond the reach of any quick rescue, which is exactly why the hijackers felt safe there.

Four Hercules in the dark

The Israeli plan was audacious to the point of madness: fly four C-130 Hercules transports low and at night, down the length of the Red Sea and across hostile Africa, and land unannounced at Entebbe. Commandos would storm the terminal before the Ugandans understood what was happening. To buy those critical seconds, the lead aircraft carried a black Mercedes and Land Rovers to mimic Amin’s own motorcade. Boeing 707s flew in support, one as an airborne command post and another set up as a field hospital in Nairobi.

Ninety minutes on the ground

The Hercules touched down close to 11 p.m. The motorcade ruse carried the assault team to the terminal, where in a sharp, violent action they killed the hijackers and freed the hostages. While the commandos fought, ground crews refuelled and loaded the aircraft, and Israeli troops destroyed eleven Ugandan MiG fighters on the apron to prevent any pursuit. Within about ninety minutes, all four Hercules were airborne again.

Of the hostages, 102 were rescued. Three were killed in the crossfire, and a fourth, the elderly Dora Bloch — taken to a hospital before the raid — was later murdered on Amin’s orders. Around forty-five Ugandan soldiers died. The single Israeli military loss was Yoni Netanyahu, shot as he led the assault. The operation was renamed in his honour.

Half a century on, Israel has begun releasing the classified files on the raid — but the essential facts have never needed embellishment. Four propeller-driven transports flew 2,500 miles into hostile Africa, plucked a hundred people from under a dictator’s nose, and were gone before dawn. It remains the gold standard of the long-range rescue.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica; Wikipedia; The Times of Israel.