Operation Entebbe: Codenamed Operation Thunderbolt
- Jul 3, 2024
- 7 min read
On 4 July 1976, Israeli commandos flew over 2,500 miles to Uganda, landed at Entebbe Airport in the dead of night, and freed 102 hostages in under 90 minutes. The whole operation was planned in a week. The commandos wore Ugandan uniforms and drove a black Mercedes identical to Idi Amin's presidential car to get close to the terminal. They lost one of their own men. It remains one of the most studied special forces operations in military history.
Air France Flight 139
On 27 June 1976, Air France Flight 139 departed Tel Aviv for Paris with 248 passengers and 12 crew. It made a scheduled stop in Athens. During the stopover, four hijackers boarded: two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Jayel al-Arja and Fayez Abdul-Rahim al-Jaber, and two members of the West German Revolutionary Cells, Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann. Shortly after takeoff, Böse rushed the cockpit with a revolver and a hand grenade and declared the aircraft was now named "Haifa." The plane was diverted to Benghazi, Libya, where it refuelled over seven hours on the ground. One passenger was released there: a British-born Israeli woman named Patricia Martell, who had faked a miscarriage convincingly enough that the hijackers let her go. She immediately contacted Israeli intelligence with the first detailed information about who was in charge of the plane.
After Benghazi the plane flew south for five hours, eventually landing at Entebbe International Airport in Uganda at 3.15pm on 28 June, more than 24 hours after the original departure. President Idi Amin, who had been quietly briefed in advance, was waiting on the tarmac to welcome the hijackers. At least four more PFLP operatives were already there to join them. Amin visited the hostages personally over the following days, presenting himself as a mediator while providing the hijackers with Ugandan soldiers, weapons, and logistical support.
The Hijackers: Who Were Böse and Kuhlmann?
The presence of two Germans among the hijackers was immediately noted and immediately uncomfortable. Böse and Kuhlmann were both founding members of the Revolutionäre Zellen, or Revolutionary Cells, a far-left German militant group that had participated the previous year in the Carlos the Jackal-led OPEC siege in Vienna. Böse had studied political science and sociology at Frankfurt and Freiburg, dropping out both times after a semester. He ran a left-wing bookshop in Frankfurt before going underground. Kuhlmann had studied pedagogy in Hanover and worked part-time caring for disabled children. Friends described her as warm, principled, and socially committed. Both had trained with the PFLP in South Yemen.
Their behaviour at Entebbe diverged dramatically. Kuhlmann, using the codename "Halima," was widely remembered by survivors for verbal abuse that several described as antisemitic in nature. Hostage Ilan Hartuv later said she "yelled and acted like a Nazi." Her former partner Gerd Schnepel later suggested she had felt pressure to appear tougher as a woman in a male-dominated operation. Böse, using the codename "Mahmood," was calmer and more conflicted. What happened when the hostages were separated would define how he was remembered.
The Selection
On 29 June, the hijackers separated the Israeli and Jewish hostages from the rest. Böse and Kuhlmann personally conducted the sorting, directing Israelis and those they identified as Jewish into an adjoining room while releasing the others. The parallels to Nazi selection processes at concentration camps were impossible to ignore, and several survivors said so explicitly.
One of them was Yitzhak David, an Auschwitz survivor. He approached Böse, pulled up his sleeve, and showed him his camp tattoo. "I was mistaken when I told my children that there is a different Germany," he said. "When I see what you and your friends are doing to women, children and the elderly, I see that nothing has changed in Germany." Böse blanched. He trembled. "I'm no Nazi," he said. "I am an idealist." He went on to explain that he was opposed to the German government because it had allowed former Nazis to retain positions of power. The exchange lasted several minutes and was witnessed by multiple hostages.
He also accepted, without protest, the decision by Air France captain Michel Bacos and his crew to remain voluntarily with the Israeli hostages rather than leave with the released passengers. Bacos, who had fought with de Gaulle's Free French during the war, said he saw a direct parallel between the Entebbe selection and what he'd witnessed in wartime. "I knew perfectly well what separation meant and what it would lead to," he said later. "I wasn't going to run off and leave my passengers to their fate."
The final hostage count was 94 Israeli and Jewish passengers plus the 12 Air France crew. Around 150 non-Israeli, non-Jewish passengers were released and flown to Paris on 30 June.
The Planning
In Israel, the government was under enormous pressure. The hijackers' demands were the release of 40 Palestinian militants held in Israeli prisons plus 13 more held in four other countries. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin initially authorised negotiations as a stalling tactic. Defense Minister Shimon Peres pushed for a military option from the start. The man tasked with drawing up the military plan was Ehud Barak, then a senior officer who would later become Prime Minister.
The key intelligence breakthrough came from released hostages and from a remarkable source: the Israeli construction firm Solel Boneh had built the Entebbe terminal in the 1960s and still had the original blueprints. The commandos could train on an exact replica of the building. They rehearsed the assault repeatedly in the days before the operation, timing every element down to the second.
The force that would carry out the raid was Sayeret Matkal, Israel's elite special forces unit, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, older brother of future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The plan called for four C-130 Hercules transport aircraft to fly from Israel to Uganda, roughly 4,000km, at low altitude to avoid radar detection. They would land without lights. A black Mercedes Benz and two Land Rovers, painted to match Ugandan military vehicles, would drive from the plane directly to the terminal.
The planes left Israel at 1.20pm on 3 July 1976. The flight took seven hours at low altitude. The lead plane touched down at Entebbe at 11pm local time with its lights off, using the runway's landing lights that had been left on. The Mercedes and Land Rovers rolled out and drove toward the old terminal building, with Israeli commandos in Ugandan army uniforms. Two Ugandan sentries challenged the convoy. One was shot with a silenced pistol. He sat back up, wounded rather than dead. A second Israeli, unwilling to risk further noise, fired again with an unsilenced weapon. That shot ended the element of complete surprise, but the commandos were already close enough to the terminal that it didn't matter.
The assault on the terminal took 53 seconds from the commandos entering to the last hijacker being killed. Böse, according to hostage Ilan Hartuv, was the only hijacker to enter the hostage hall when the shooting started. He initially pointed his Kalashnikov at the hostages, then almost immediately ordered them to take shelter in the restroom rather than firing. He was killed by Israeli commandos seconds later. Kuhlmann and the other hijackers in the adjoining room were killed when commandos threw grenades through the connecting door and entered firing.
Three hostages were killed during the raid: Jean-Jacques Maimoni, a 19-year-old who stood up and was mistaken for a hijacker; Pasco Cohen, 52, hit by commando fire; and Ida Borochovitch, 56, killed by a hijacker in the crossfire. All seven hijackers were killed, along with around 45 Ugandan soldiers. The Israelis also destroyed eleven Ugandan MiG fighter jets on the ground to prevent pursuit.
Yonatan Netanyahu was shot outside the terminal during the withdrawal, hit by a Ugandan soldier firing from the airport control tower. He was the only Israeli commando killed. The operation was renamed Operation Yonatan in his honour after his death.
Yonatan's younger brother Benjamin Netanyahu, then 26 and studying at MIT, flew home immediately. He later said his brother's death was the moment that set the course of his entire political life. "Yoni's death was the central event of my life," he wrote in his memoir. He went on to found the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in his brother's memory, wrote a book on international terrorism dedicated to Yonatan, and built his entire political identity around the conviction that terrorism must be confronted without negotiation. He served as Israeli Prime Minister for longer than anyone in the country's history. The shadow of a single night at Entebbe airport runs through all of it.
Dora Bloch
Dora Bloch was a 75-year-old British-Israeli dual citizen who had choked on a piece of food during the hostage crisis and been taken to Mulago Hospital in Kampala for treatment before the raid. When the Israeli commandos left Entebbe, she was still in hospital. She was not rescued.
After news of the raid became public, Idi Amin ordered Dora Bloch murdered. She was dragged from her hospital bed by Ugandan security forces. Her body was found in a field outside Kampala after Amin's regime fell in 1979. She was eventually repatriated to Israel and buried there. The British government lodged a formal protest. Uganda broke off diplomatic relations with Britain in response. Idi Amin himself died in exile in Saudi Arabia in 2003, never prosecuted for the murder.
Aftermath and Legacy
The 102 rescued hostages and crew landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv on 4 July 1976 to scenes that Israeli newspapers described as unprecedented. The operation was celebrated across much of the Western world as a demonstration of what a state could do when its citizens were threatened abroad. In the year that followed, Kuhlmann's codename "Halima" was adopted as the name of the commando unit that hijacked Lufthansa Flight 181 in 1977, demanding the same outcome: the release of far-left German prisoners. That operation also ended in a commando raid, this time by German GSG 9 forces, and also failed.
Operation Entebbe sits alongside the capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 as one of the defining moments of Israeli intelligence and special forces history: operations that required extraordinary planning, accepted enormous risk, and were carried out thousands of miles from home. The Eichmann operation brought a man to trial. Entebbe brought people home. Both demonstrated the same underlying conviction: that Israel would go wherever it needed to go to protect its people.
Sources:
1. Wikipedia: Entebbe Raid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid
2. Wikipedia: Wilfried Böse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfried_B%C3%B6se
3. Wikipedia: Brigitte Kuhlmann. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigitte_Kuhlmann
4. Reform Judaism: How a Holocaust Survivor Led a Hijacker to Confront His Conscience. https://reformjudaism.org/blog/how-holocaust-survivor-led-hijacker-confront-his-conscience
5. Middle East Forum: Who Were the Entebbe Hijackers? https://www.meforum.org/the-hijackers-of-entebbe-the-full-story
6. Militär Aktuell: Operation Entebbe — The Israeli Showpiece. https://militaeraktuell.at/en/operation-entebbe-the-israeli-showpiece/
