Just four minutes after the arrival of the last two planes from Entebbe, Hercules Four accelerated down the main runway and took to the sky on the last leg of the hostages’ week-long odyssey. A nightmare journey that had for most of them begun in Israel, before taking in Greece, Libya and Uganda, was about to end where it had started.
Not that the hostages yet knew of their final destination: that had been deliberately kept from them in case the twenty or so French nationals objected. Instead the Golani soldiers on board tried to raise spirits by passing round their water bottles and offering sweets. They also gave the hostages makeshift ear-defenders to drown out the noise of the engines and help them sleep. Most found the ear-defenders heavy and uncomfortable, but kept them on. A few lucky ones, like Maggy and Agnès, used cotton wool instead.
Since the wounded had been removed, there was now more room for those left and the soldiers helped by fixing up some hammocks. Isa, Cécile and Marianne were now sitting rather than standing, and others had settled in ‘where they can’: Willy was by a port window, perched on a box of medicines; Maggy was in the car with the soldiers; and Agnès was sitting further forward with a young Frenchman called Julian who was nursing a twisted ankle. Suddenly, Agnès’ nerves gave out and she burst into tears. ‘Don’t cry,’ said Julian, stroking her arm. ‘You’ll make all the others cry.’
‘I’m thinking,’ she replied between sobs, ‘of Jean-Jacques.’
‘Please don’t cry. They don’t all know he’s dead.’
Maggy, too, was haunted by flashbacks of the injured man in the chair and of Jean-Jacques’ bullet-riddled body. As hard as she tried, she could not dispel them from her mind.
Ignoring the instruction not to smoke, some hostages accepted cigarettes from the soldiers and improvised ashtrays from the boxes that had held their ear-defenders. They were then encouraged to lie down and sleep, because it was going to be a long flight. Before she did so, Agnès asked one of the soldiers who could speak French: ‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll soon see.’
‘Come on,’ she persisted. ‘Tell me, where are we going?’
‘To a beautiful country.’
She concluded from this that they were bound for Israel. Looking around her, Agnès could see a variety of costumes: Isa was wearing an oversized tee-shirt that she had borrowed from Jean-Jacques and a skirt made from an Air France blanket; Willy had lent his jumper to the stewardess who had left the Old Terminal dressed only in a camisole top and small pair of knickers. Many were wearing just their underwear, and the makeshift clothes were more to protect people from the cold than to preserve their modesty.
Before long, all conversation had ceased: there was too much noise and everyone–soldiers and hostages alike–was exhausted. Most people fell asleep, some stretched out next to the dead bodies.
By now all six of Operation Thunderbolt’s planes were in the air: Hercules One was airborne by 3.13 a.m. local time, followed by the command and control 707 at 3.40 a.m.; Hercules Two and Three took off at 4.07 a.m. and 4.15 a.m. respectively; and the last to leave Nairobi–with Surin Hershko and the other seriously wounded on board–was the Boeing 707 medical plane at 5.18 a.m.
Uri Lubrani’s promise to President Kenyatta at around 2.20 a.m. that the Israeli planes would be gone in three hours had been kept almost to the minute.
On hearing the incredible news from Entebbe, Uri Dan raced into the city centre office of the popular daily Maariv newspaper where he worked as chief correspondent. Like every other Israeli journalist, he was hoping for a scoop; but, unlike them, his method was to go straight to the horse’s mouth by calling the office of the Ugandan president and asking to speak to Idi Amin himself.
It was a long shot, he knew, and one he did not expect to succeed. But it did. After a lengthy delay, and much consultation at the other end of the line, Amin came to the phone. ‘I am,’ he told Dan, seemingly on the verge of tears, ‘holding in my arms my soldiers who died from the bullets of your people. In return for the good I did, you caused me harm.’
He was speaking, he said, from the airport where they were ‘counting the victims’ of last night’s action. It was all so unnecessary. ‘I was planning to seek the release of the Israelis and came back earlier from Mauritius for that purpose, and all that’s left now is for me to count the dead.’ His soldiers could easily have shot all the Hercules down, he added, but they chose not to.
‘Why,’ asked Dan, ‘were your soldiers there? Isn’t it true that they, as well as the Palestinians, were holding the hostages?’
Amin denied this. ‘My soldiers were 200 yards from the building,’ he said, not entirely truthfully, ‘and the Palestinians were inside. As your people will confirm when they return to Israel.’
And so the conversation went on, with Amin continuing to insist that he had been working to resolve the crisis. ‘I treated them very well. We did everything for them. We gave them food, we gave them toilet articles, and we protected them, in order to exchange them. And what do I have left now? Instead of thanking me, you kill my people.’
Why, asked Dan, were your soldiers killed if they were not cooperating with the Palestinians?
‘My soldiers were there to guard the Israelis,’ insisted Amin. ‘I saved their lives. Tell them when they get to Israel that I wish them happy lives. I even said that to Colonel Bar-Lev when I spoke to him by phone. If my soldiers had shot at the planes they would have killed your soldiers. But we did not want to fight. We can fight–but we did not want to.’
After yet more of Amin’s protestations of innocence, Dan asked if he planned to declare a state of emergency. ‘Don’t you fear that after an operation like this, a blow like this, you may lose your position?’
‘No… no,’ stuttered Amin, ‘… my soldiers are with me and they help me and there are no problems at all.’
‘Will you declare a state of emergency?’ Dan persisted.
‘Yes.’
While most of his men slept, Muki Betser sat up front in the cockpit of Hercules One with Joshua Shani and his crew. Usually after an operation he and Yoni Netanyahu would talk together ‘about what had just happened’ and what they planned to do next. But Netanyahu was dead and the ‘natural loneliness of the commander’ had ‘never sat so heavily’ on Betser’s shoulders.
As the plane thundered homewards, Betser kept trying to understand what Yoni ‘was thinking when he decided to take out the Ugandan’. He must have thought, Betser concluded, that the sentry was a threat, and that he and Giora Zussman, with their silenced guns, could ‘quietly eliminate’ him. Yet, as far as Betser was concerned, it was contrary to the plan: which was to allow nothing to distract them from their central aim of getting to the Old Terminal as quickly as possible.
And yet Betser, as he mulled over the events of the night, was able to take comfort from the fact that ‘despite everything–the wounded Ugandan, the bunched-up run to the building from fifty metres away, the blocked entrance’–the Unit was still able to react fast enough to ‘surprise the terrorists before they could harm the hostages’. Or so Betser thought as he flew back to Israel. What he did not realize, however, was that the Unit’s premature burst of firing had given the terrorists the opportunity to start killing people–but for some reason they had chosen not to.
Deep in thought, Betser was brought back to reality when Shani tuned his radio to the Voice of Israel and a newsreader announced that Israeli government sources had confirmed international media stories that Israeli troops had rescued the hostages from Entebbe. Betser was furious. They were, he knew, still facing ‘three hours of flight within reach of enemy aircraft from Egypt and Saudi Arabia’. Yet someone in Israel ‘couldn’t wait to make the announcement’ and was ‘endangering’ their lives by doing so.
A few hours after hearing the radio report of fighting at Entebbe Airport, Gerd Schnepel and Magdalena Kopp received the news they had been dreading: Israeli commandos had mounted a successful rescue mission, rescuing the bulk of the hostages and killing seven terrorists in the process. Their comrades Kuhlmann and Böse were among the dead.
Schnepel and other RC members were ‘furious’ about the killing of their comrades and immediately plotted revenge. ‘We wanted to do a very brutal response,’ Schnepel recalled. ‘We were checking out aeroplanes and things like that, to just blow them up in flight. That was our first idea. But luckily we didn’t go through with it.’
Forty-five minutes ahead of Betser’s plane, Hercules Four was flying so low that Willy was able to see through his porthole the spray from the waves sweeping across the Red Sea. The sight of the low sun glinting on the water was beautiful. But Willy could not appreciate it: he was desperate for the seemingly interminable flight to end.
Suddenly land came into view and, as the plane gained altitude, Halivni’s voice came over the intercom. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said in Hebrew, ‘we are now flying above Sharm el-Sheikh.’
They had reached Israeli territory: they were safe. This was the moment when all the hostages–but particularly the Israelis–knew that their long and traumatic ordeal was finally over. They let out a great cheer and embraced those near to them. Some were in tears. It was now that Eran Dolev, the head of the surgical team, revealed his dry sense of humour. ‘I have to tell you,’ he said over the intercom, ‘that last night Israel introduced VAT for the first time at eight per cent. If you don’t like it, you’re free to return to Entebbe.’ No one laughed.
Having overseen the admission to Mulago Hospital of the wounded from Entebbe, Health Minister Henry Kyemba went home for a couple of hours. But he returned to Mulago at 10 a.m. to check on Dora Bloch, the Israeli hostage that he had deliberately kept in hospital because he thought it would be more comfortable for her than the Spartan conditions in the Old Terminal.
Now, however, he realized his mistake. Because she was in Kampala during the raid, Dora Bloch had not been rescued with the other hostages. The presence of injured Ugandan soldiers in nearby wards, moreover, meant the risk of her being killed in revenge by Idi Amin’s humiliated troops was very real. Kyemba had considered moving her to a different hospital with Amin’s approval so that it could be done ‘under proper guard’. But he decided against this because it would ‘only have drawn attention to her’ and might have encouraged Amin to ‘order her execution on the spot’. Kyemba’s reason for visiting Mrs Bloch, therefore, was simply to say ‘hello’ and warn the staff ‘not to talk to her about the events of the previous night, in case she became unduly frightened’.
During their very brief conversation, it was clear to Kyemba that Mrs Bloch knew nothing of the raid. Her only request was to be allowed to wash the grey dress she had been wearing for the last couple of days. Kyemba made this possible by procuring a three-quarter-length white hospital gown–one of the few available–for her to wear while her dress was drying. He then departed for his official residence, hoping against hope that by leaving her where she was, and keeping quiet about her, ‘the problem would solve itself’.
Waiting beside the runway of Tel Nof Air Force Base near Rehovot, twelve miles south of Tel Aviv, Israel’s political and military leaders craned their heads upwards for the first sight of the plane carrying the rescued hostages. It was a beautiful summer’s day and many of the VIPs–who by this time included Generals Kuti Adam and Benny Peled, their faster Boeing 707 having landed two hours earlier–were shielding their eyes from the glare of the sun.
At the centre of the group was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and sunglasses, his hands placed expectantly on his hips. On his left stood Shimon Peres, in a blue shirt and cream slacks; and next to Peres was Motta Gur, dressed in olive-green combat fatigues, consulting his watch.
Eventually someone spotted a tiny speck approaching from the south. As it got closer, the distinctive high-tailed shape of a Hercules C-130 became visible. It eventually landed and came to a halt close to the VIPs who, meanwhile, had surged on to the tarmac. Once the rear ramp was lowered, the hostages emerged blinking into the sunlight. They were greeted with shouts and applause, and one or two of them–including Michel Bacos, the Airbus’s pilot–spoke briefly to Rabin and Peres. The rest were directed by air force personnel towards a couple of waiting buses that would take them to a nearby hangar where refreshments had been prepared. Though their families and the press were waiting to greet them at Ben-Gurion, the hostages had been brought first to Tel Nof so that they could be debriefed and the soldiers and equipment taken off Hercules Four.
The IDF had arranged for a film crew to capture for posterity the hostages’ arrival at Tel Nof: from the moment the plane landed to the departure of the buses. In the secret film–released in 2010–many of the hostages are waving or giving the thumbs-up to the camera; others look dishevelled and disorientated. On one bus they can be seen celebrating their arrival by sipping from a distinctive bell-shaped bottle of chocolate-orange-flavoured Sabra liqueur.
In the hangar the hostages found a huge table, about sixty feet long, piled high with fruit, cakes, toast, coffee and drinks. Agnès devoured a bunch of grapes, crying and laughing as she did so. Willy ate two pieces of toast and ten peaches. Then Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres arrived to speak to some of them. Approaching Agnès and Maggy, the defense minister asked in halting French: ‘Are you happy that the Israelis have freed you? Did the attack last a long time?’
‘No, no,’ replied Agnès. ‘It was very quick.’
‘Did it all pass by okay?’
Thinking of Jean-Jacques and the other dead and injured, they both hesitated before Maggy replied: ‘Not for all of us.’
A short while later, Peres spoke to all the French former hostages in Hebrew while someone translated for them. ‘We are very happy to have got you here,’ he said, ‘and freed you after all the difficulties that stood in our way. Once you get back to France, you will be able to tell everything that you would like to about your experience. But we ask you now–and it’s the only thank-you that we expect–to keep total silence about what happened from the moment the Israeli soldiers arrived. Please consider this a military secret and that you do not have the right to speak about it.’
To Willy this request seemed superfluous. He approved, however, of the special mention that Peres then made of the crew of the Airbus who were applauded by everyone in the room.
The one awkward moment came when Emma Rosenkovitch, who had returned earlier with her two children in the Boeing 707, spoke to Rabin and Peres. ‘Thank you for what you did,’ she said. ‘I hope you have as much success with the peace process.’
Angered by this jibe, Rabin frowned and stalked away. Peres was more conciliatory. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, clapping Emma on the shoulder, ‘we will do it.’
Not long after this, the hostages reboarded the buses and were taken back to Hercules Four–which, in the meantime, had been ‘emptied, washed and swept’–for the short fifteen-minute flight to Ben-Gurion. While waiting to re-embark, they saw another C-130 land and were told that it, too, had participated in the operation. It was Hercules One. The time was 10.29 a.m.
As the hostages took off a few minutes later for Ben-Gurion, the VIPs were welcoming back the soldiers on Hercules One. Rabin and Peres shook hands with each of the soldiers as they disembarked from the side door. When Betser appeared, Peres asked him: ‘How was Yoni killed?’
‘He went first, he fell first,’ said Betser.
Rabin reserved his warmest welcome for Joshua Shani, the pilot, who was enveloped in a bearhug that seemed to last an age. ‘Thank you,’ said the prime minister.
Finally the black Mercedes was backed out of the Hercules by Amitzur Kafri and driven away. It was packed with soldiers of the Unit keen to get back to their base as quickly as possible. Betser and the others had to wait for helicopters. While they did so, the last two Hercules landed and Rabin and Peres gave short speeches to most of the soldiers who had taken part in the operation, thanking them for their efforts. Rabin spoke ‘like an army commander’; Peres talked of the soldiers’ ‘contribution to the fight against international terror’.
A few hours later, once all the Unit’s soldiers had returned to base, a debriefing was held by Yoni’s replacement, Amiram Levine. Normally this would have involved only those who took part. But Levine decided to break with precedent by inviting everyone on the base. First the officers, then the team commanders and finally the individual soldiers reported on what they had seen and done. The soldier who had fired the live burst from the Land Rover explained that when he saw ‘the Ugandan get back up on his feet, and aim at us’, he ‘feared for our safety’.
That night there was for the Unit no victory celebration. Even a single casualty was proof that the Unit’s performance ‘did not match’ its plan. Betser knew that to ‘maintain its abilities’ the Unit needed to learn from its mistakes. It was for that reason that he and the other participants talked long into the night ‘about what happened, each of us from our own point of view, trying to understand what went wrong on the night of our most famous initiative’.
During the fifteen-minute flight to Ben-Gurion International Airport, the hostages were offered a fresh set of clothes by Hercules Four’s aircrew so that they could look their best when they met their families and the press. Still wearing her Air France blanket, Isa accepted a whole outfit: pale-green cotton jumper and skirt, and black sandals.
Nothing, however, could prepare the hostages for the fervour of the welcome that awaited them at Ben-Gurion. As Hercules Four’s rear ramp was lowered to the ground, those nearest could see a huge crowd threatening to surge through the police cordon towards them. The sound it was making was deafening: shouts of joy, applause, songs and even blasts of welcome from a shofar.*
The first hostages to leave the belly of the plane were assailed by well-wishers and members of the press, the latter taking photos and asking questions. They struggled towards buses that would take them to their families. Agnès had almost reached one when she noticed a girl running from the crowd, crying and screaming, ‘Judith! Judith!’
The girl was the sister of a young married Israeli hostage who had received a slight graze from a bullet. When she reached Judith, she threw her arms around her neck, and was soon joined by other family members, all equally delighted. It was too much for Judith who promptly fainted.
Willy held Isa’s hand so they would not be separated, and they eventually got into one of the buses which took them and the other hostages to a large building–half hotel, half military barracks–where the other families were waiting. ‘Men and women began shrieking with joy,’ read Terence Smith’s report in the New York Times, ‘as the rumpled and weary-looking hostages disembarked from buses… Flinging their arms about each other, whole families stood locked in swaying, weeping embraces. There were old women in babushkas, young girls in slacks, men with a week’s growth of beard. There was near-chaos when several political leaders arrived on the scene. Mr Rabin and Mr Peres were mobbed by a happy crowd and Menachem Begin, the leader of the opposition, was lifted on shoulders and carried about to rhythmic cheers of “Begin! Begin! Begin!”’
The Israelis were submerged by hordes of emotional relatives, leaving the others–the twenty or so French, two Belgians, two Americans and the lone Swedish stewardess–feeling more than a little ‘left out’ of the celebrations.
Willy and Isa grabbed a Coke from the drinks table before asking a female soldier: ‘What are we going to do now? Where will we go?’’
She took them to a little side room where people from the French Consulate were arranging provisional passports. The consul was there, but when Willy and Isa were introduced he responded: ‘I haven’t seen anyone else. I will see you in a minute.’
Neither took kindly to being snubbed and formed the impression, as did Agnès and Maggy, that while the crew were expected the other French hostages were not. All of them opted to return home immediately on the next Air France flight and not to stay on in Israel for a short all-expenses-paid holiday. In the meantime, after speaking to journalists and doing a brief interview for Israeli TV, the non-Israelis were driven to the Plaza Hotel on the beachfront in Tel Aviv where a large and vociferous crowd was waiting to greet them. In their rooms they found bottles of champagne and baskets of fruit. But journalists continued to harass them, and eventually Willy responded to one who asked his profession: ‘I’m making missiles for Israel.’
At 3.30 p.m. they were taken back to the airport for the direct flight to Paris in an Air France Boeing 707. Many fell asleep immediately and woke up only as the plane began its descent. Waiting for them in the VIP room at Orly were their families and some of the released hostages. Agnès was met by her dad; Willy by his wife and Gilles, who also embraced Maggy. The ordeal, for them, was finally over.
For four Israeli families, however, there would be no celebration and no closure. Woken by her father at 4 a.m. with the news that the hostages had been freed and they must head for Ben-Gurion Airport, Martine Mimouni-Arnold was convinced that she would soon see her brother Jean-Jacques. But shortly after Hercules Four had landed, she and her parents were waiting in the building set aside for the hostages’ families when an ominous message came over the public address system: ‘Would the Mimouni and Borochovich families please come to the Officers’ Club.’
Robert Mimouni was perplexed. ‘Why are they calling us?’ he asked.
Martine had no answer. Her chief fear at this point was that Jean-Jacques had been injured. With Martine hobbling on crutches, they eventually found the Officers’ Club and were taken into a side room where an officer inexplicably told them: ‘I’m very sorry, but your son had an asthma attack and died.’
Unable to take in the awful news, Robert turned to Martine and said: ‘That’s impossible. Nobody dies from an asthma attack. It’s impossible.’
As Jean-Jacques’ mother Rachel fainted, his father started screaming that the officer was lying and he wanted to see his son. Eventually they took Robert and Martine to a nearby room where Jean-Jacques’ corpse was lying beneath a sheet. The intention was to let Robert see only his son’s face. But he pulled away from the soldiers holding him and tore off the sheet. There, plain for his father and sister to see, was the cause of his death: seven livid bullet wounds from his throat to his lower abdomen.
Enraged as much by the unnecessary deception as by the fact of his only son’s death, Robert screamed at the officer: ‘You lied to me!’
He smashed a chair to the ground and when two officers tried to intervene he attacked them. Losing patience, the doctor warned him to calm down or he would be given a sedative. This prompted Martine to shout: ‘Leave him alone! He has just lost his son. Let him scream! Let him cry! Get away from him!’
But when Robert continued to shout, they held him down and injected him. Only now, as the sedative took effect, did he stop screaming. He was finally led away by Jean-Jacques’ aunt and uncle who had arrived from their nearby home in Moshav Ramot Meir. As he left, Robert lamented: ‘Look at all the people here! They are all singing and dancing, and my son is dead!’
Robert would never discover the truth of his son’s death–that he was accidentally killed by Israeli bullets–though he made many attempts to find out. By leaving for the airport so early that day, he narrowly missed two IDF officers who had been sent to his house to inform the family of Jean-Jacques’ death. They might at least have told him that his son died in the firefight between the terrorists and the IDF. Instead he was told at the airport that the cause of death was an asthma attack–possibly on the orders of senior government officials who did not want any gloss taken off the successful operation–and it would not be until 2006 that Jean-Jacques’ nephew Jonathan Khayat, just two months old in July 1976, heard the truth first-hand from Muki Betser. In 2012, to honour the memory of his uncle and the other Israelis who died at Entebbe, Khayat narrated and appeared in a moving documentary called Live or Die in Entebbe. In it, ex-Sergeant Amir Ofer tells him: ‘I know this is painful to hear, but had I seen him I would also have shot him. It was the right thing to do. You have no choice in some situations. It wasn’t me, but I don’t blame the people who did it. They did not make a mistake, they did the right thing, the thing we planned to do.’
Khayat’s only regret was that his grandfather was never given such a frank admission before his death in 1996. ‘I think,’ says Khayat on the documentary, ‘it would have definitely helped him to heal… He felt they were put aside.’
Because the other two hostage fatalities–Pasco Cohen and Ida Borochovich–were travelling with family members, there was never the same mystery as to how they had died. For a time Hannah Cohen clung to the conviction that her husband would survive his injuries. Told that he would be back in Israel before her, she checked all the hospitals. There was no sign of him. Eventually she was informed by the IDF that he was in hospital in Nairobi and would be back ‘in a few days’. So she returned to her home in Hadera with Tzipi and Kobi, only to receive a knock on the door at four in the afternoon. Standing outside were soldiers with bad news. Pasco had lost too much blood and died on the operating table.
The first member of the Netanyahu family to hear of Yoni’s death was his younger brother Iddo, himself a member of the Unit’s reserves. First Iddo received a mysterious telephone call at his Jerusalem home in the early hours of 4 July from an officer in the Unit who asked him to stay indoors and once ‘all this is over, you can go back to your usual routine’. Iddo was then asked for the number of his other brother Bibi, who was studying in the United States. He gave it, and realized a rescue had taken place only when he heard it announced later on the radio.
He next got a call from Bibi who was ‘overjoyed at the news of the raid’ and wanted to know if Iddo had heard from Yoni. The answer was no, and the reason became clear when officers came round to Iddo’s home to inform him in person that Yoni was the only Israeli soldier to die at Entebbe.
During his lifetime, thanks to the secret nature of his work, Yoni was ‘virtually unknown’ to the Israeli public. But within twenty-four hours of the rescue his name would become a household name throughout the country.
At the first post-operation Cabinet meeting, held shortly after the return to Israel of the command and control Boeing 707, Kuti Adam told the ministers that the commander of the Unit, Yoni Netanyahu, had been shot and killed by a Ugandan soldier as he ‘ran to the terminal’.
Yitzhak Rabin’s chief concern was that Yoni’s father Benzion, ‘the father of Revisionist Zionism’ and a professor of Jewish history at Cornell University, should find out about his son’s death ‘from us and not from the press’.
Shimon Peres added: ‘I want the government members to know that today we lost one of the greatest soldiers the Jewish people have ever had. Yoni and his brother served in the same unit. They both risked their lives many times. He was one of the most wonderful people this country’s ever had.’
Just a few hours after the return of the hostages to Israel, Yitzhak Rabin addressed a special session of the Knesset in Jerusalem. ‘Mr Speaker,’ he declared, ‘Members of the Knesset, in a bold, resourceful and sophisticated effort, the Israel Defense Forces have succeeded in carrying out the decision of the Government of Israel to save and liberate from captivity the passengers of the Air France plane, who were hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and kept prisoner in Uganda, with their lives in danger.’
Explaining that four Israelis–three civilians and one officer–fell in the fight (a suitably neutral description that deliberately avoided identifying the killers), he described the rescue as one of the IDF’s ‘most exemplary victories from both the human and moral and the military-operational points of view, a remarkable manifestation of Jewish fraternity and Jewish valour’.
He then explained how the decision to launch the operation had been taken by his government ‘on its sole responsibility’, and without consulting any other government in advance. It did so because it had become ‘clearer and clearer that the attack against the Israeli and Jewish passengers was the principal objective’ of the terrorists. All indications showed, moreover, that the Ugandans were collaborating with the terrorists.
He had, he added, only praise for the opposition politicians in their support of the government throughout the crisis: first for the decision to negotiate a release of terrorists in exchange for the hostages’ lives; and then for launching the rescue operation once a viable plan had been put forward by the IDF.
Characterizing the rescue as ‘Israel’s contribution to humanity’s struggle against terrorism as an international manifestation’, he predicted that it would long be ‘a subject for research, for song and for legend’. He concluded by expressing his ‘special thanks and appreciation’ for the ‘IDF, the Chief of Staff, the General Staff, the Arms of the Forces, and those who personally participated in the operation–for risking their lives in the fulfilment of their duty as Jews and human beings, and for being an example and a source of pride to us all’.
Not a natural orator, the ex-soldier Rabin had given a heartfelt and compelling account of why his government had authorized the raid of another country’s territory, killing a number of its soldiers and destroying much of its air force. It was left, therefore, to that silver-tongued demagogue Menachem Begin, leader of the Likud party, to sum up the significance of the rescue to Israel and its people. Responding to Rabin’s statement, he began: ‘Not since the Six-Day War has our nation known such a profound sense of unity. We shared a common anxiety and a sense of fraternal love for our people, emanating from the resolve to rescue our brothers and our sisters in peril. Perhaps it was because of this unity that we found within ourselves the capacity to mount such a momentous operation–a rescue mission unprecedented in gallantry and daring.’
Having paid tribute to those who had lost their lives, including ‘a most valiant commander who charged at the head of his troops’, he described the soldiers and airmen who carried out the mission as ‘Maccabees… risen anew’. But his greatest praise he reserved for Yitzhak Rabin. Turning towards the prime minister, he declared:
You and I belong to different political factions. Our outlooks differ… But not today. On this day… Mr Prime Minister, I salute you. I salute you for what you have done. I salute, too, the Minister of Defense, as indeed I do all the members of the Cabinet, and everyone involved in the most difficult decisions a nation’s leaders can possibly make. But you, Mr Prime Minister, you who are the leader of a team–and I have some knowledge of being a leader of a team–I say that while all your colleagues have a share in the decision-making responsibility, upon your shoulders rests an extra morsel of responsibility. And who can measure the weight of that extra morsel?
Begin then made the inevitable–if inaccurate–analogy between the German-sanctioned selektzia at Entebbe and the more infamous actions of Dr Mengele at Auschwitz when a finger to the right had condemned Jewish men, women and children to death. Then there had been ‘no one to save them’; now there was. ‘Now,’ he said, his voice rising for emphasis, ‘we declare for all to hear: Never again! Our generation has taken a solemn oath consecrated in the blood of our slain mothers, our butchered fathers, our asphyxiated babes, and our fallen brave–never again will the blood of the Jew be shed with impunity. Never again will Jewish honour be easy prey.’
The world should know, he added, that if ‘anyone anywhere’ is ‘persecuted, or humiliated, or threatened, or abducted, or is in any way endangered simply because he or she is a Jew’, then Israel would marshal all its strength ‘to come to their aid and bring them to the safe haven of our homeland’. This was ‘the message of Entebbe’.
The thunderous applause went on for some minutes as politicians of all hues registered their approval. For this one day, at least, Israel’s Jews were united.
British diplomat Peter Chandley was at home with his wife, still digesting the incredible news from Entebbe, when he received a call from his boss James Horrocks, the acting high commissioner. Horrocks had just heard from the French Embassy that one of the hostages, a seventy-three-year-old Israeli-British dual national called Dora Bloch, had been admitted to Mulago Hospital two days earlier and was ‘still there’. Aware that Mrs Bloch’s life was in mortal danger, Horrocks asked Chandley to get over to Mulago as quickly as possible to arrange her release from hospital and speedy departure from Uganda, preferably via Air France.
At around the same time, but many thousands of miles away in the Caribbean, British Foreign Secretary Tony Crosland was still recovering from sea sickness on board the royal yacht Britannia when he received a cable from his deputy Ted Rowlands informing him that, according to the Israeli Embassy in London, a hostage with dual British and Israeli nationality called Dora Bloch ‘hadn’t got away from Entebbe’ and was in a Kampala hospital. He immediately cabled Horrocks in Kampala with instructions ‘to get Mrs Bloch on the first available flight out of Uganda’. But Horrocks had already acted.
Accompanied by his wife to make the visit seem as innocent as possible, Chandley arrived at Mulago Hospital at 6.30 p.m. and was waved through the main gate. Up on the sixth floor they found the door to Mrs Bloch’s room locked and a nurse inside. When they gestured through the glass panel for her to open the door, she said she needed the authority of either the doctor in charge or the matron. When the matron arrived, she said that one of the two plainclothes men guarding the room would have to give permission. Chandley showed his diplomatic identity card to the men and asked what they were doing.
They refused to say, though one eventually claimed, none too convincingly, that he was a nurse. While being questioned, the two men showed not ‘the slightest change of expression’ and Mrs Chandley thought they were ‘frightening’.
Eventually, after much discussion, the Chandleys were allowed into the room to speak to Dora Bloch. This was the result of a phone call from the hospital to Henry Kyemba, the minister of health who had visited Mrs Bloch earlier that day. Kyemba knew that Amin would not have approved of a British diplomat ‘talking’ to Mrs Bloch; but he gave his permission for a ‘quick visit’ because he thought it ‘would provide some kind of reassurance to both parties’.
The Chandleys spoke to Dora Bloch ‘in the presence of the nurse, the matron and the two plainclothes men’, who insisted on listening in. Still unaware that the raid had taken place, the old lady confirmed to Peter Chandley that she ‘was a British subject, though all her documents were lost’. She told him that she had been ‘on her way to America to attend her son’s wedding and another son was accompanying her as far as Paris’. His name was Ilan Hartuv and she wanted Chandley to give him the message ‘Mother is all right’. The diplomat said he would.
When Chandley asked how she was feeling, Dora said she was ‘fit and able to leave’, but did not like the food and had hardly eaten since her admittance on Friday. Turning to the two plainclothes guards, Chandley suggested that he and his wife should be allowed to take Mrs Bloch home with them until her departure from the country could be arranged. But the ‘nurse’ shook his head. He was arranging transport to take her to the Imperial Hotel in Kampala and ‘that was that’. Eventually admitting defeat, Chandley said he would go home to prepare some food for Mrs Bloch and return within the hour. This the men agreed to, as did the guard on the main gate when they drove out. Before they departed, the Chandleys gave Mrs Bloch ‘some toilet articles’ they thought she might need.
It was now 8.30 p.m. When the Chandleys returned to Mulago with food at 9.15 p.m. they were stopped at the main gate by a new guard. No cars with ‘CD’–Corps Diplomatique–number plates were being admitted, he told them. Even when they returned with a police escort they were refused entry. Eventually, having handed the food to a nurse who promised to give it to Mrs Bloch, they drove away. They later discovered from a senior British medic who worked at the hospital that the food had indeed been delivered, ‘but it was too late as Mrs Bloch had been taken away’. The nurses, added the medic, ‘were in tears’.
It would take many days before Chandley and Horrocks discovered what had happened next. According to Henry Kyemba, Idi Amin was still ‘smarting with humiliation’ at the brutal ease with which the Israelis had rescued the hostages when he discovered that, contrary to his orders, Mrs Bloch had not been returned to the Old Terminal and remained in the hospital in Kampala. He at once sent four men to exact revenge on the defenceless old lady. Two of them–Major Farouk Minawa, the head of the State Research Centre (Amin’s secret police), and Captain Nasur Ondoga, chief of protocol to the president–marched up to her ward where they ordered hospital staff to stand aside and the guards to open the door. They then hauled the terrified Mrs Bloch out of bed and ‘frogmarched her’ down the flights of stairs, ‘leaving behind her cane, handbag, shoes and dress’. She ‘screamed continuously’.
By now the commotion had alerted staff, patients and visitors who watched in horror as the two men dragged Mrs Bloch, ‘still screaming, through the casualty department and out of the main hospital door’. Put into the back of one of two waiting cars, Mrs Bloch was then driven away at high speed. And through all this, though they must have known she was going to her execution, the spectators did nothing. ‘Interference,’ noted Kyemba, ‘could mean death. And after all, this was not the first public kidnapping in Uganda. It had become an everyday occurrence.’
Minutes later Kyemba received two separate calls from the hospital, telling him what had happened. He in turn called Amin, who did not seem unduly concerned. ‘Is that so? Okay. I’ll see.’
Kyemba had no doubt that Amin ‘already knew what had happened’. No one would have dared do such a thing ‘except on Amin’s orders’. His initial hope was that Amin ‘might try to use Mrs Bloch–the only remaining hostage–as a pawn to enforce the Palestinians’ demands’. But when he reflected on the fact that she had been ‘seized in public by Amin’s own thugs’, he realized there ‘was no doubt that she was going to be executed’.
He soon received confirmation from Amin himself. The call from the president was chiefly to discuss the care of those wounded in the raid and the burial of the dead–including the terrorists–that was scheduled for the following day. Amin added: ‘Oh, by the way, that woman in hospital–don’t worry about her–she has been killed.’
Though shocked, Kyemba had by this time learned to keep his reactions to Amin’s excesses as neutral as possible. ‘Oh dear,’ he muttered.
Having put down the phone, he vented his anger to his wife Teresa and a visitor. ‘This is outrageous!’ he told them. ‘That poor lady, to take revenge on her like that. This is terrible.’
But there was nothing he could do. The hostage crisis had claimed its fifth and last Israeli victim.