Reminiscences of operation Entebbe

• 'Operation Thunderbolt' was later rechristened as 'Operation Yonathan' in memory of its slain commander Lt.Col.Yonathan Netanayahu.
• Presenting the plan to Ehud Brog (Barak): "Ehud has the idea: The success of the operation depends on surprise. This was the most important principle of this operation... ". The limits of the operation: The difficulty of landing in Entebbe without the enemy knowing, the weather, flying without lights.
• The plan to rescue more than 100 hostages held at Uganda's Entebbe airport was certainly unprecedented. The mission would be a success or the alligators would have a festival.
• Later, soldiers would joke that the plan sounded like a script from Mission Impossible. The Israelis would land without arousing suspicion, pretend to be Ugandan guards travelling in an entourage of Land Rovers behind President Idi Amin in his famous black Mercedes, and overtake the terrorists with the element of surprise, despite hundreds of enemy soldiers in every direction.
• The charm offensive on Amin paid off. When Amin received the news that the Israelis agreed to negotiate, he ordered the hijackers to extend their deadline to 2pm on July 4.
• In the first Hercules, on its way back to Israel, a pilot heard Idi Amin on shortwave radio and attached it to the loudspeaker. Idi Amin announced that he had reoccupied the airport. Everyone burst out laughing. "It was a grand finale".
• At the time of the raid, one hostage, Dora Bloch, a 75-year old woman, was not present at the airport. She had been taken to Mulago hospital in Kampala, following a choking incident. Dora Bloch was subsequently murdered on Idi Amin's orders. 
• The raid has been dramatized in articles, books & movies.
• The raid is remembered today as one of Israel’s finest hours, and was the reason the then unknown Benjamin Netanyahu launched his political career – after his brother Yonatan Netanyahu, the only Israeli soldier to die in the raid, was hailed a national hero. He became Prime Minister of Israel in 2009. 
• Kenya's allowing Israeli planes to use Nairobi airport for medical facilities and refueling en route back proved very costly. Few days after the raid, 245 Kenyans were killed in Uganda.
• Israel was viewed with admiration rather than suspicion or hostility. Entebbe would become a byword for military daring, the subject of three blockbuster movies, taught and studied by armies around the world – including by the architects of the raid that captured and killed Osama bin Laden. 
• At Benghazi, Libya was a brief refueling stopover,  just long enough for a British-born woman, Patricia Martel, to pretend she was having a miscarriage and get herself released from the plane. Not only was the miscarriage a fake, Martel wasn’t even pregnant. But she was a nurse – and a good actor.
• Lt. Col. Tzevi Tirosh, acted on a hunch and called an old friend, Yitzhak “Itche” Gadish. Gadish had spent much of the 1960s in Uganda, heading the international arm of Engineering Services, a large Israeli engineering firm. Speaking to Haaretz in his Ramat Aviv apartment, Gadish recalls how he had become acquainted with the Ugandan dictator during that decade. Amin ordered him to fly to Arua, the small northwestern town on the Ugandan-Congolese border where he had grown up, and to draw up grandiose plans for an international airport. Ultimately, that project was nothing more than a fantasy, but Gadish was also asked to tender for work on the redevelopment of Entebbe airport. The Ugandan Public Works Department gave him a set of plans. However, thinking he had no chance of winning the tender, Gadish tucked them away in his drawer and took them back to Israel when his time in Uganda was over in 1969.
• Late that June 1976 evening, Lt. Col. Tzevi Tirosh picked up Gadish and together they drove to the Israeli offices of Engineering Services. Gadish no longer worked there, but was able to get hold of the keys from a former colleague. As the clock ticked toward midnight, they found the Entebbe plans in a filing cabinet – “a stack 8-inches high,” Gadish recalls. They took them over to Peled, whose eyes lit up. “You’ve got it?” he asked Gadish. Armed with this key piece of intelligence – plans for the derelict passenger terminal building where the hostages were being held – plus snapshots, home movies and sketches from Israeli soldiers who had trained Ugandan pilots at the airport, Maj. Gen. Benny Peled could suggest the most audacious plan of all: to land a large IDF force at Entebbe, free the hostages and fly them out of the airport.
• At 2:30 in the afternoon on July 3, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told the security cabinet, for the first time since the hostage situation developed on June 27, that he was in favor of the military option. “Not out of an idealization, far from that, but with knowledge toward what we are heading, toward wounded, toward dead… nonetheless, I recommend that the government to authorize this. Defence Minister Shimon Peres, later that evening, with the planes airborne, wrote, “The planes are on their way and with them the fate of Israel.”
• Four Israeli C-130 Hercules aircraft were loaded with the rescue force and their vehicles. Additionally, medical staff were loaded on board an Israeli Air Force Boeing 707. Another 707 was used as communications centre encircling over Entebbe.
• To avoid radar, Israeli commando planes flew extraordinarily low – at one point no more than 35 ft off the ground. 
• They made it in time: the hijackers had not had the chance to open fire on the hostages. As the commandos burst into the terminal building, one hijacker was killed instantly. Two more were killed immediately on entering.
• The Israelis then used armoured personal carriers, carried on the other C-130 Hercules, to secure the airport perimeter and other airport buildings. All the Hercules aircraft were refueled from Entebbe's own fuel tanks, using pumping equipment that the commandos had brought with them. 
• After the raid, the Ugandan government complained to the United Nations Security Council that the raid was a violation of Ugandan sovereignty. Israeli ambassador to the UN, Chaim Herzog, famously told the Security Council that Israel was proud of its action. The Security Council ultimately declined to take any action or even pass a resolution about the matter. 
• In his address to the Security Council the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Chaim Herzog said: "We come with a simple message to the Council: we are proud of what we have done because we have demonstrated to the world that a small country, in Israel’s circumstances, with which the members of this Council are by now all too familiar, the dignity of man, human life and human freedom constitute the highest values. We are proud not only because we have saved the lives of over a hundred innocent people—men, women and children—but because of the significance of our act for the cause of human freedom."
• In 1976, Israeli self-confidence was low. The country had been rocked by the surprise attack of the Yom Kippur war in 1973, which had felt like a brush with collective catastrophe. It had also watched, powerless, as 11 of its athletes had been held hostage, then killed at the Olympic games in Munich in 1972. Entebbe felt like an antidote, if not a redemption.
• Entebbe changed the tactical calculus. Palestinians had to reckon on the possibility that Israel might travel halfway across the world to free its people, if that’s what it took. Hijackings were abandoned. PLO renounced “the armed struggle”. Entebbe had helped establish the notion that Israel’s reach was simply too long for it to be defeated militarily.
• The Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin was eventually overthrown in 1979, following a war between Uganda and neighboring Tanzania. 
• In 1980, when 52 US embassy staff in Tehran were held hostage, Jimmy Carter asked to see Shimon Peres – who had been defence minister during Entebbe to ask his advice. Carter was planning an Entebbe-style rescue mission of his own.
  Carter asked Peres: ‘If you were me, what would be your opinion?’
  Peres said: ‘Fly. You don’t have a choice.’ 
• Well, it was a catastrophe. The botched raid on Iran was a humiliation for the US president, aborted amid mechanical failures and a midair collision before America’s aircraft got anywhere near the US hostages. Eight US servicemen lost their lives; Carter’s standing never recovered. But that very failure fed the myth of Entebbe: it suggested that Israel had managed a feat that was beyond the capacity of even the mighty US.
• As late as 2011, when the US military planned its operation to capture and kill Osama bin Laden, the man in charge was Admiral William McRaven, author of a detailed study of the raid on Entebbe. When it came to audacious missions – involving stealth flights over vast distances, maintaining the element of surprise till the last moment – Entebbe still seemed the best precedent.
• At least one hijacker seemed about to shoot the hostages. But instead, he urged them to take cover. At the last moment, they realized, 'No, we won’t do it because it’s over’. Rabin declared the mission one of the “most exemplary victories from both the human, moral, and the military-operational points of view”, but it owed its success more to luck than to Israeli military brilliance, and to a last-minute display of humanity on the part of a doomed terrorist.
• One hostage told  “We were saved but it was bad for Israel. It made peace less likely.”
• Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin wanted to give in to the terrorists’ demands – the exchange of hostages for 40 Palestinian militants – if there was no viable military option;  but defence minister Shimon Peres thought that would encourage more terror. Rabin gave in, and authorised the rescue after the terrorists’ extension of their deadline by 3 days that gave Israeli military chiefs enough time to come up with a viable plan.
• Much could go wrong – and it almost did. There was a gap in the planners’ knowledge of at least 30 per cent. They didn't know the exact location of the hostages, whether the building had been wired with explosives or even the proper layout of the airport. Another omission almost caused the lead plane to taxi into a ditch. Only the pilot’s quick reactions saved them.