TEL AVIV — For the survivors of Operation Entebbe, marking the fiftieth anniversary was much less a celebration of one in all Israel’s most mythologized navy operations than a reckoning with the space between the nation that rescued them and the one which failed to stop one other mass hostage disaster many years later.
About two dozen of these rescued at Entebbe and their family members gathered on Monday on the Peres Middle for Peace and Innovation in Jaffa for an occasion honoring Sorin Hershcu, the Israeli paratrooper gravely wounded within the 1976 raid. Teasing and jokes repeatedly broke by the formalities, giving the room the texture of an unruly prolonged household.
The hijacking started when an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris carrying 246 passengers was seized after a cease in Athens by terrorists from the Fashionable Entrance for the Liberation of Palestine and Germany’s Revolutionary Cells. The aircraft was diverted to Uganda, the place the despotic, notoriously unhinged dictator Idi Amin gave the hijackers secure haven. They separated Israeli and Jewish passengers from a lot of the others, who had been launched over two days.
On July 4, Israeli commandos flew 1000’s of miles to Entebbe and rescued greater than 100 hostages in an audacious raid that grew to become one in all Israel’s defining navy operations.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary, Israel launched beforehand categorized protocols from the raid, later renamed Operation Yonatan, after Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother and the operation’s commander who was killed in the course of the mission. (Uganda’s navy chief Muhoozi Kainerugaba in February introduced plans to erect a statue of Yoni Netanyahu on the airport within the actual spot the place he was killed, saying it could strengthen his nation’s “shut blood relations with Israel.”)
The paperwork, together with cupboard minutes and cellphone information, present the federal government abandoning its longstanding coverage of not negotiating with hostage-takers even because it ready the navy rescue.
A crowd lifts the squadron chief of the Entebbe raid on his return to Israel, July 4, 1976. (David Rubinger/CORBIS/Corbis by way of Getty Photos)
Most of these on the anniversary gathering had been the so-called kids of Entebbe, the youngest hostages from the raid now of their 50s and 60s who nonetheless meet often. Three of them — Benny Davidson, who was 13 on the time, Shay Gross, who turned 6 in Entebbe, and Tzipi Cohen Gonen, who was 8 — had simply returned from their first journey again to Uganda, the place they visited the previous Entebbe terminal during which they’d been held at gunpoint for per week.
Cohen Gonen’s return to Uganda meant going again to the place the place her father, Pasco Cohen, a Jerusalem physician, was shot and killed, one in all 4 hostages who misplaced their lives. She was terrified to return, she mentioned, however accepted the Ugandan authorities’s invitation as a result of she needed to confront the location instantly.
“I needed to look evil within the eyes,” she instructed the Jewish Telegraphic Company. “It closed a circle in that means, as a result of the Ugandans had been so good to us. However there was no closure for my father’s dying.”
Standing once more close to the tarmac the place she and the opposite kids had performed throughout their captivity, Cohen Gonen mentioned the reminiscences got here again with drive, however by grownup eyes. The management tower, which had appeared huge to her as a toddler, out of the blue regarded a lot smaller.
“I stood on the runway crying my eyes out, and had a protracted dialog with my father,” she mentioned.
Gross mentioned he was additionally terrified to go to. Gross, the one one of many hostages formally acknowledged as a sufferer of terror, mentioned he stays in therapy till right this moment.
“I didn’t know what going again there would do to me,” he instructed JTA. When he reached the previous terminal, he mentioned, the whole lot regarded the identical, “as if 50 years hadn’t handed.”
Recalling the second a terrorist struck him and knocked him to the ground, Gross mentioned, “I broke down.”
Davidson, who mentioned he returned to Entebbe to “meet his 13-year-old self,” in contrast the sense of public stress and mutual accountability then with the response to Israel’s hostage disaster following Hamas’ assault on Oct. 7, 2023.
“There was no WhatsApp, no protest motion,” Davidson mentioned of Entebbe. “However the individuals of Israel demanded that the state do one thing. They usually did it. There was precise management, each navy and political.”
Then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his spouse Leah Rabin attend the premiere of the movie “Raid on Entebbe,” March 1977. (William Karel/Sygma by way of Getty Photos)
The newly launched information present the federal government weighing whether or not to interrupt with Israel’s longstanding refusal to yield to terrorist calls for and focus on the discharge of imprisoned terrorists. The stress got here most instantly from the hostages’ households, who wrote then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that “human life is extra treasured than ideas,” pressed ministers to barter and, at one level, compelled their means into the prime minister’s workplace to demand a gathering.
The rescue allowed him to maneuver on rapidly, Davidson mentioned. “Possibly that’s why I’m not scarred.”
From the seat subsequent to him, Gross interjected: “Oh, you’re undoubtedly scarred.”
Laughing, Davidson mentioned he remained hopeful about Israel’s potential to endure the present disaster.
“We’ll get by this,” he mentioned, “as a result of we now have no different selection.”
Cohen Gonen didn’t share Davidson’s confidence, evaluating the military that reached them in Entebbe with the absence many Israelis felt on Oct. 7.
“I want Benny would inject me with some optimism. Till now I don’t really feel secure,” she mentioned. “In Entebbe, it didn’t even come as a shock that the military got here to rescue us. It felt pure and logical. However what occurred on Oct. 7, with no military, no authorities, no nothing, it shook me to my core.”
She remembered flying dwelling on one of many Israeli Hercules transport planes that carried the rescue drive and the hostages again from Uganda, wrapped in blankets as troopers handed sweets to the youngsters. “You say to your self, okay, one thing dangerous occurred right here, however the military was right here,” she mentioned. “You’re feeling like somebody is watching out for you.”
She seen Rabin as a father determine, recalling operating into him years after Entebbe at a mall when she was a pupil at Ben-Gurion College in Beersheba. “I instructed him I used to be there due to him,” she mentioned. The 2 hugged and spoke for half an hour. When Rabin was assassinated in 1995, she turned to her husband, Oren, and instructed him, “Dad was murdered a second time.”
To Cohen Gonen and others within the room, Rabin’s readiness to resign within the occasion of failure stood in distinction with Netanyahu, who has resisted requires a state fee of inquiry into the failures of Oct. 7 and has not publicly accepted private accountability.
“At this time I’ve no Dad, in each senses of the phrase,” she mentioned.
After Oct. 7, Cohen Gonen crawled into mattress for 3 days, closed all of the blinds in the home and armed herself with hammers and iron bars.
“To be kidnapped in Athens on an Air France aircraft is smart,” she mentioned. “However to be kidnapped at dwelling, within the State of Israel, it was an excessive amount of.”
Gross mentioned Rabin’s resolution to ship a rescue drive with “a hospital in a aircraft” confirmed he understood the operation might finish with “dozens of useless and wounded,” and nonetheless handled the danger as his to hold, drafting a resignation letter in case the mission failed.
“He put that resignation letter on the desk, as a result of he knew that what stood between success and failure was a matter of seconds, and whether or not or not the terrorists would throw a grenade,” Gross mentioned.
“That’s the distinction between a pacesetter who takes accountability in actual time and leaders who received’t,” he mentioned.
Tzipi Cohen Gonen, left, and Regine Levi embrace at a reunion of rescued Entebbe hostages in Tel Aviv, June 29, 2026. (Deborah Danan)
After Oct. 7, Gross started going nearly day by day to the rehabilitation wards at Sheba Medical Middle at Tel Hashomer, the place most of the battle’s wounded troopers are handled.
“They’re our heroes,” he mentioned. “Let’s hope we’ll see a brand new technology of leaders from them to take us to higher days.”
For Hershcu, Entebbe’s lesson was that terrorism could possibly be confronted fairly than accommodated. As a 21-year-old paratrooper nearing the top of his obligatory service, he had already been despatched on discharge depart when the mission was put collectively. Decided to affix, he grabbed the rifle of a fellow soldier who was within the bathe and reported for obligation — a choice he mentioned he stays ashamed of to at the present time.
Shot in the course of the raid, Hershcu was left paralyzed from the neck down. Years later, he helped discovered LOTEM, a corporation that makes nature accessible to individuals with disabilities.
He was reluctant to attract direct comparisons with Oct. 7 or focus on Israel’s present leaders, saying he had “no new insights” about what classes Entebbe may maintain. Even an operation that grew to become a part of Israel’s nationwide mythology, he mentioned, can fade in a rustic repeatedly overtaken by new crises.
“Individuals overlook,” Hershcu mentioned. “Entebbe could also be singular, however there have been so many others. In Israel, we don’t have quiet intervals. There may be only a chain of dramatic and tragic occasions.”
Ella Rosenkovitch, who at 5 was the youngest hostage in Entebbe, mentioned Oct. 7 and its aftermath left her livid. Unable to just accept that hostages had been trapped in Gaza, Rosenkovitch joined the protest motion calling for his or her launch. “I felt that is the one factor I might do,” she mentioned. “Again then we felt that our leaders knew that saving our lives was above all else. Today we will’t say the identical factor.”
She hesitated over the comparability to her personal captivity. “What can I say?” she mentioned. “What’s Entebbe compared to this horror?”
Nonetheless, she agreed to talk as soon as at an illustration in Jerusalem, she mentioned, as a result of the previous hostages from Entebbe had one factor to supply. “Hope,” she mentioned. “As a result of they allow us to go.”
Regine Levi, one other of the previous little one hostages, supplied a distinct perspective. She was 6 when she was taken to Entebbe, however as a French-born little one was launched earlier than the raid and solely later immigrated to Israel together with her household. Levi mentioned she avoids speaking about politics, not as a result of she sees no failures, however as a result of that isn’t the place she chooses to look.
“We’re not previous Oct. 7. We’re nonetheless inside it,” Levi mentioned. “So why deal with the division? The sense of accountability for each other that we had then continues to be right here. It didn’t disappear, regardless of who the leaders are. That’s what I select to see. That, and the way wonderful our individuals are.”
Reporting the tales that outline our period. When historical past unfolds in real-time, the Jewish world turns to JTA. Your help ensures we will doc the complexities of battle and the resilience of Jewish communities with integrity.
