When the cabinet meeting began at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Prime Minister Rabin and Defense Minister Peres expected it to be short, since both of them supported the operation. But the debate went on far longer than they’d anticipated. After Chief of Staff Gur presented an outline of the operation, one of the ministers asked: “How many casualties do you expect?” Gur said it was difficult to predict, but that, based on the simulation the night before, he thought the mission would probably succeed. The losses were likely to be low, but there was a chance that as many as twenty hostages would be killed.41 And, Gur admitted, one could never know what would happen in a military action. Success depended on absolute surprise. If the terrorists had even one minute’s warning, they could kill all the hostages with a few grenades and some bursts from their AK-47S, and when the troops arrived, there would be no one left to save. Furthermore, the force would go into action at a distance of a good many hours’ flight from Israel. With a hitch of any kind, there was definitely a risk that not one man in the whole force would come home. And the men who were going, Gur stressed, were Israel’s finest.
Gur’s remarks had an effect. A long, exhausting debate began, with many questions asked and many reservations voiced.
Without a doubt, it was one of the toughest decisions an Israeli government had ever faced. Rabin made it clear that if the raid failed, the government would have to resign. But when the final vote was called, all hands were raised in favor. Only two days had passed since the cabinet had voted, also unanimously, to give in to the demands of the PLO splinter-group holding the plane. The new decision had been made by the cabinet as a whole — but the ultimate responsibility' rested on Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
At 3:30 p.m., more than an hour after the force put down at Sharm alSheikh, word came to go forward with the mission. In fact, the cabinet had not yet reached its decision, but in order to keep to the timetable, the order had been given to set out. The force could still be ordered home if the cabinet decided against the operation.
Yoni informed the Unit’s men that they were taking off. “We’re going to do it,” he told them, as the roar of the just-started engines drowned out his voice.
“Yoni went around and told the men, who were surprised to hear they were actually going,” says Shlomo. “Not that he was raring to fight, but he didn’t look at all worried by the go-ahead either. You could see that he felt very comfortable, that he was finally starting to breathe easy.” Others had the same impression: Yoni was relaxed and buoyant from the moment the order was given, and stayed that way throughout the flight.
Among the men the general feeling was very positive, though not free of anxiety. They had felt confident even before, when they boarded the plane at Lod, but the feeling now grew much stronger. They believed in their ability to carry off the mission. “When we left Sharm al-Sheikh, I had a good feeling, that I was prepared for action. I don’t remember any fear, even in the back of my mind, that I wasn’t as ready as I should be,” says one officer, who only twelve hours before, after the simulation and a harried day of preparations, had gone to sleep with a nagging fear that the Unit wasn’t ready for the operation. And another officer, who had talked the night before with friends about how to keep the mission from being approved, says: “When we boarded the planes, we were extremely confident, and this confidence had been inspired, first and foremost, by Yoni.” The men did not doubt any more that they would succeed in freeing the hostages. The only thing that still worried them was whether they would be able to get out of Entebbe. The possibility that they might be stranded in Africa, thousands of miles from Israel, didn’t leave their minds.
The troops were told to hurry on board. To maintain secrecy, Yoni hadn’t wanted the members of the assault force to put on their camouflage fatigues before they reached Sharm al-Sheikh, and on board the plane, he thought, it would simply be too crowded to change. Bukhris recalls that they stood on the runway, quickly pulling off their regular olive-drab uniforms and putting the mottled ones on.
At that moment Shomron passed by and started yelling: “What are you guys doing now? Who needs this nonsense?”
They finished dressing without responding to his shouts. “He was talking about our ‘nonsense’ when the whole operation depended on the ruse, which we kept our mouths shut about,” says Bukhris. “When you’re about to go out on a mission like this, and suddenly an officer of that rank starts yelling at you, and about something that small that you need twenty seconds for.. .it really left a lousy taste in my mouth.”
The four planes were loaded much more heavily than was permitted in training, and possibly more heavily than any Hercules transport had been loaded before. The fuel tanks were absolutely full, including the wing tanks. Besides the air force flight crew, Shani’s Hercules One carried the Unit’s assault force of 29 men and its three vehicles, as well as 52 paratroopers and part of Shomron’s command team.
Hercules Two, Nati’s plane, may have been even heavier. It carried two of the Unit’s APCs and their 16 troops, Dan Shomron’s command jeep and the other half of his team, and 17 more paratroopers.
Hercules Three, piloted by Maj. Aryeh, carried the Unit’s other two APCs and their men, along with 30 Golani fighters and their jeep.
On board Hercules Four, Halivni’s plane, were two Peugeot pickups, one for the Golani contingent, and the second to transport the fuel pump. The plane also carried the pump itself, the ten members of the refueling crew, the ten-man medical team, and twenty more Golani soldiers.
The runway at Sharm al-Sheikh lies across a low hill, making it impossible to see the end while the plane is accelerating for takeoff. The Hercules was designed for improvised battle-field airstrips, and the pilots were used to making short takeoffs. They were unpleasantly surprised. The planes gained speed with great difficulty, and to the men at the controls, it seemed that the runway would end before the planes got off the ground. Making matters worse was the 100-degree desert heat, which cut the power of the engines by as much as a third. The trip down the runway, heading northward against the wind, seemed to last forever before the planes finally gathered enough speed to lift into the air.
After his plane had gained altitude, Shani wanted to turn around and begin heading south, but he found he couldn’t. He was flying only two or three knots above the velocity at which the plane would stall, spin out of control, and crash. The Hercules refused to pick up speed, and every time Shani tried to make the turn, it began to shake, forcing him to straighten out again to keep from endangering the plane and its load. “No responsible pilot has ever handled an aircraft under such conditions,” he says.
After a while the planes stabilized and made the turn southward towards Africa without mishap. They flew the length of the Red Sea only about 200 feet above the waves, to avoid Saudi radar on the east and Egyptian radar on the west. Still, the flight was considerably more comfortable than the previous one, because fewer air pockets form over water than over land. When the planes’ radar detected a passing ship or the crewmen sighted one themselves, they swung as far away from it as possible, so no one below would notice the four military aircraft heading southward. That caused repeated deviations from the planned flight path, and each time it took careful navigation to return to the right course. In the daylight, the planes’ pilots could still follow each other by sight, but when night fell they would have to manage with radar alone.
The flight path followed the narrow strip of sea a long way. The planes would stay at low altitude until reaching a certain set of coordinates, where they would begin climbing and turn southsouthwest toward Ethiopia. Ethiopia had no radar that could effectively track combat aircraft at night; once there, they would be able to fly at 20,000 feet, which would require less fuel.
In the belly of Hercules One, the soldiers were packed together with barely any room to move. The paratroopers were crowded between the vehicles and the sides of the plane. The Unit’s men had the middle, which meant sitting in or on the vehicles, lying on the floor under them, or sprawling out on the hoods of the cars or the roof of the Mercedes. It was quiet; the soldiers spoke only a few words to each other. For the most part, each was lost in his own thoughts, at times peering out the windows at the blue water and the shoreline where the Saudi Arabian desert met the sea.
Wedged between the front of the Mercedes and the plane’s rear cargo gate, Yoni and Muki explained to Amos Goren his role in the mission. All three sat leaning against the gate. Amos, who had been added to the assault force at the last minute to replace the soldier who had gotten sick on the first flight, was only vaguely familiar with the layout of the terminal and the tasks of the various teams. Yoni sketched the plan of the terminal and the assault routes on the back of an air sickness bag as he spoke. No matter what happens, he and Muki told Amos, he should stay right behind Muki.
“At exactly the moment when Yoni was explaining all this to me, we were informed that the government had given us the green light, that we were going to do this… Yet he stayed completely calm.. .and went on explaining my job to me as though we were going to do an exercise.”
The private briefing lasted about twenty minutes. When it ended, Amos took the bag, and after looking it over again, folded it up and put it in his pocket.
Yoni and Muki climbed into the Mercedes. They sat in the front seat, and Yoni took the book he had brought with him out of his pocket and started to read. He usually read when he was forced to wait for something, which was why he’d brought the book. But he probably also knew the effect it would have on the men, who would see that he, at least, wasn’t tense. When he read one passage, he laughed to himself and said to Muki in mock admiration: “Listen, these are real men. What are we, compared to them?” Then he noticed Amitzur standing in front of them, fixing the way the Ugandan flag on the front of the Mercedes looked. “He’s a boy wonder, Amitzur is,” Yoni said to Muki with affection. Afterwards, Amitzur sat down in the Mercedes for a little while and talked with Yoni. They spoke “a little about life,” Amitzur recalls, “and Yoni talked about what we were about to do, and how important it was.”
A little while later, the plane hit turbulence. The Mercedes was bouncing up and down, and everyone got out. Yoni went forward to the flight deck, maneuvering his way over the vehicles.
The normally roomy flight deck was crowded to the limit with officers. Most were sitting on small wicker stools. Shani sat up front in the pilot’s seat, with Einstein to his right in the copilot’s place. Immediately behind them were the navigators. Rami Levi, the El A1 pilot who had been attached to them, was looking over the Jeppesen guide. He was the one who was supposed to speak with the control tower at Entebbe if the need arose, and wanted to get his story straight. After examining the various airports in East Afriea-in the guide, he decided that it would be best to pose as a small Kenyan aircraft, taking off from Kisomo Airport in Kenya near the Ugandan border. Rami rehearsed the words he would use. Afterwards, he sat down on the floor of the plane with a map of Uganda spread out beside him, and passed the time preparing the flight pattern for the descent.
Einstein asked that someone pass him a piece of cake. The custom was for the load masters to provide food for the crew during the flight, since they had little to do once the cargo was loaded on board. And indeed they had put a cake on a tray at the back of the flight deck, and Yoni, who was sitting next to it, passed a piece up to Einstein. But the copilot sent it back, calling to Yoni: “No, I want a moist square from the middle, not one from the edge.”
Yoni smiled and quipped: “Are these pilots ever spoiled! Poor things can’t eat from the edge of the cake.” He sent up another piece, and had some himself.
From time to time Yoni and Shomron would ask the navigator questions about their precise position and flight path. Shani conferred with Shomron and Yoni, and they agreed again that they would land no matter what, whether they found the runway lighted or dark. They both gave Shani full backing for his plan of pretending to be the pilot of a plane in distress if the lights were out. Yoni studied the new aerial photos yet again, and also went over a number of points with Shomron and Lt.-Col. Haim Oren of the Infantry and Paratroops Command, including the exact time at which the two would arrive in their command jeep at the old terminal.42
Yoni also spoke a bit with Matan Vilna’i, who was on the flight deck too. The two knew each other not only from the army, but from growing up in Jerusalem. In 1968, when he was studying at the Hebrew University and trying to decide whether to go back into the army, Yoni had gone to Vilna’i to ask his advice. “What would you do?” he asked. “Should I go back to my paratroops battalion and be a company commander, or should I go to Bibi’s unit?” Vilna’i, who was then in the paratroops, answered without a moment’s hesitation that if he were in Yoni’s place, he’d choose the Unit. And within a few weeks, Yoni joined the Unit as a junior officer. Nearly eight years later, now the Unit’s commander, he stood with Vilna’i on the flight deck of a plane heading south over Africa.
Yoni now talked with Lt.-Col. Haim Oren, whom he knew from their joint service in the Haruv commando unit. At one point in the conversation, Yoni said: “If he’s there, I’ll kill him.”
“Who are you talking about?” asked Haim.
“Idi Amin,” said Yoni.
Haim was stunned. He urged Yoni to banish the thought from his mind, but his pleading fell on deaf ears. “You can’t do something like that. It hasn’t even been discussed. You’d have to ask for approval,” Haim said.
“I don’t intend to ask. If Idi Amin is there, I’m going to kill him,” said Yoni, without offering explanations. From Yoni’s point of view, the reasons were self-evident.
In a letter he had written to Tutti seven years before, he had said: “What an insane world we live in! In the twentieth century we’ve landed on the moon, and there’s still more to come. But the twentieth century has also seen Hitler and his mass murders. And it saw the horrors of World War I. Yet we still haven’t learned. Today we’re seeing an entire people being wiped out by starvation [in Biafra], and still no one is concerned enough to get this ugly world to do anything about it. All of us — including Israel, including me — are caught up in our own wars, and there’s not a single country willing to go in with its army and stop what’s happening there. Of course not. No one wants to get involved. What strange animals people are.”43 Now he had firmly decided that if he saw this monster of a man named Idi Amin, who’d murdered hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, and who threw the victims of his torture chambers from the top floor of Kampala’s fancy Nile Hotel, he wouldn’t let him get away alive.
In the rear of the plane many of the men had dozed off, overcome by both the accumulated exhaustion of the week and the drowsiness induced by the anti-nausea pills. But many others couldn’t fall asleep. Some busied themselves with simple tasks like checking their ammo vests or aligning their sighting lights yet again in the relative darkness of the plane after nightfall. Otherwise, there was little to do but sit and think about what was coming and what one had already done in life. Bukhris sat the entire time in his place in the jeep, wearing his ammo vest and rifle, his machine gun at his side, studying the faces of the soldiers around him.
Amir also did not shut his eyes for a moment, even though 2½ days had passed since he’d last slept. “We were flying, and at a certain point we realized that we just weren’t turning back, that we couldn’t even if we wanted to, because there wasn’t enough fuel. A lot of guys went to sleep… but I didn’t manage to sleep the whole flight, not for a second. The whole time I was thinking and repeating over and over what I was supposed to do and how I was going to do it. I wasn’t shaking with fear, but I was very tense.”
Sometime during the flight, Muki called Amir and Amos over. The two had been assigned to handle the bullhorns, and Muki discussed with them what exactly the hostages should be told. They decided once again that, at the moment of battle, the captives should simply be instructed to lie flat on the ground.
Shlomo dozed on and off. At one point he woke up and walked around the plane to stretch his legs and see what was happening. When he spotted Yoni sitting in the Mercedes, calmly reading his book, he thought to himself that this was something really special. Surin from the paratroops, who was sitting beside the car, was surprised that Yoni was reading an English book. Like most of the men around him, Surin was also unable to fall asleep — in large part because conditions were simply too cramped. Every time Surin wanted to straighten his legs a bit, he had to stick them under the Mercedes. It’s not easy to fall asleep, he found, with a car bouncing up and down above you, coming within inches of your legs.
After a few hours, Yoni wanted to go to sleep. In the rear of the flight deck, there were two narrow cots stacked as a bunk bed. The bottom bed was broken, but the top one was intact and unoccupied. Shomron, who could see that Yoni was tired, told him: “You can have the bed. You sleep on the way there, and I’ll sleep on the way back.”44 Yoni asked the navigator to wake him up half an hour or so before landing. He pulled a blue inflatable pillow from one of his pockets, blew it up, climbed onto the top bed, put the pillow under his head, and fell asleep almost immediately.
A little while later, Shani also wanted to go to sleep. Several hours were left before the landing. “I look back and see Yoni sleeping in that bed,” says Shani. “Under normal conditions, if some battalion commander is resting there, I tell him politely but firmly to go rest in the rear of the plane. This time I couldn’t bring myself to do it, because my theory was that the first group that storms that building, its chances of staying alive are fifty-fifty. I said to myself: He’s taking a huge personal risk in this, that’s for sure. He’s grabbing some sleep here. So am I going to wake him up? On the other hand, I also wanted to lie down. He was curled up on the edge. I lay down next to him, getting closer little by little till I was a few millimeters away from him.”
Lying there, Shani closed his eyes, but they snapped open a minute later. He felt the weight of the responsibility he bore, and he could feel his heart pounding rapidly. Would he manage to land without trouble, he asked himself, or would he have to make several passes over the airport before he could put the plane down? In that case would the entire airport be awakened, the terrorists alerted, the hostages killed? Because of his failure to land the plane, would they be ordered home without carrying out the mission? Variations on these questions kept repeating themselves in his mind.
“I was afraid of a failure on the national level — not just that someone would be killed or wounded, but that we simply wouldn’t succeed, that we’d cause a disaster,” explains Shani. Gur’s words from the day before — that responsibility for the operation’s success rested with the pilots, since as Gur put it, it didn’t make any difference to the Unit’s men whether they were put down in Tel Aviv or Entebbe — echoed in his ears.
“I looked at Yoni from about an inch away, nose to nose, and he was sleeping like a baby, utterly at peace. I asked Tzvika, the navigator, when Yoni had gone to sleep, and he said, ‘Listen, he went to sleep and said to wake him up a little while before the landing.’ And I couldn’t free myself from the thought: Where does this calmness of his come from? Soon you’re going into battle, and here you are, sleeping as if nothing’s happening! I got up and went back to my seat.”45
After Shani got up, Rami Levi decided that he needed to stretch out. He moved Yoni a little in order to clear himself a place to sleep. "He turned over a bit, and went on sleeping. I lay down next to him to rest a while; I knew I wouldn’t fall asleep. I didn’t know who Yoni was. I just saw a lieutenant-colonel in a camouflage uniform lying there, tired. I didn’t know that he was the commander of the Unit, but I’d seen him on the flight deck. He was in charge of something, so it seemed to me. Now I said to myself: ‘These guys probably haven’t slept in days.’ I remember this thought going through my head: And who knows if these aren’t his last hours of sleep, maybe ever.”
They woke Yoni when the plane was already nearing Lake Victoria. Most of the flight over Africa had been through Ethiopian airspace. From time to time, the pilots reported their locations, using code words signifying designated points on the route.
The planes crossed the border out of Ethiopia over the huge Lake Rudolph, and continued south-southwest over the western reaches of Kenya. Despite their altitude, the high African clouds remained well above them, dropping rain on the planes now and then. On the radio, they heard the exchange between the Entebbe control tower and the pilot of a British Airways jet as it took off from the airport, exactly on schedule. At around 10:30 p.m. Israel time, they reached Lake Victoria, flying over the bay near the Kenyan town of Kisomo. They now ran into extremely stormy weather, and the static electricity in the highly charged air sent bursts of light dancing across the windshields of the planes. Here three of the planes circled downward in the storm for about six minutes, hanging back to give the assault force time to carry out the primary action.
Hercules One flew on alone over Lake Victoria. Its flight path first took it westward, toward a large island south of Entebbe. From there it would be able to fly due north to the airport. Contact was now made for the first time with the Boeing 707 command plane that had caught up with Hercules One and was circling above. Here, out of radio range from Arab countries, they could speak Hebrew freely, without any codes. “Do you see the runway lights?” Peled asked Shani.
“Not yet,” Shani answered.
As they flew through the storm over Lake Victoria, Yoni went back into the hold of the plane. Some of the men were still asleep. Yoni went around waking them up and telling them to put on their ammo vests and prepare for landing. Giora, who was dozing in the Mercedes, recalls that Yoni had a smile on his face when he woke him up. Yoni bent down to wake up Amitzur, who was asleep on the floor of the plane under the car. Shlomo pondered the perennial soldier’s question of how many layers of clothing to wear — the storm outside told him nothing about whether it would be hot or cold in Uganda. Alik, who had slept for most of the flight on the hood of one of the jeeps, felt very hungry when he awoke. He had not eaten any of the food they’d been given at Sharm al-Sheikh, and now he went up to the flight deck to find something to take the edge off his hunger.
Rani Cohen, a young officer on Yiftah’s team, had also been sleeping since the flight began. When they had taken off from Sharm al-Sheikh, word had not yet come that the raid had been approved, and Rani had gone to sleep, serenely certain that the order would soon come for the planes to return to Israel. When he awoke, he suddenly discovered he was about to land in Uganda. It was the first time that he had felt any tension whatsoever. He peered out a nearby window. The storm was already behind them, and the star-strewn sky lit the waters of Lake Victoria below. Rani went back to where he’d been sitting, went over in his mind the sequence of the actions the force would execute, and tried to envision the structure of the old terminal and its entrances.
The soldiers took their places in the vehicles. The landing approached, and the excitement among the soldiers reached a peak. Yoni now did something that none of them had ever seen before any other operation. He moved along the row of vehicles, walking on the jeeps, going from soldier to soldier, officer to officer, and with a word, a smile, an occasional handshake, encouraged his men.
“There was this reddish light, and I remember that we saw his face,” tells Shlomo. “He wasn’t wearing his beret, or his ammo vest or gun… He spoke to all the men, .smiled at us, said a few words of encouragement to each one. It was as though he were leaving us, as though he knew what was going to happen to him. He didn’t issue any orders, but just tried to instill confidence. I remember that he shook hands with the youngest guy on the force… He acted more like a friend… I sensed he felt that from here on everything, or at least nearly everything, depended on these men. He’d seen a lot of combat, and quite a few of the soldiers there had seen none at all, or a lot less than he had. And I remember him going by, joking a little, exchanging a few words, easing the men’s tension before battle.”
“Remember,” Yoni told them, “that we’re the best soldiers who’ll be there. There’s nothing for us to be afraid of.”
When he reached Arnon, he shook his hand and said, referring to the terrorists: “Don’t hesitate to kill those bastards.” He also shook hands with the men on his own team — David the doctor and Tamir the communications man. “It'll be all right ,” he told Tamir. “Well do it without a hitch, don't worry.” At the very back of his jeep, to the left, sat Bukhris. “What are you smiling about, Bukhris,” Yoni said when he reached him, tousling the shock of dark hair on the young soldier's head.
“It created a sense of personal connection between him and all of us, the men who'd be doing the fighting,” says Bukhris. “It's not like some commander way above you who hands down orders to the officers under him, and they pass the orders further down, until you, the grunt, can't even see the top of the pyramid. Yoni gave this feeling of a personal tie between the commander of the operation and the very last soldier in the force, which, in terms of age, was me. That encounter, right before we landed, left me with a very, very good feeling.”
One of the officers of the Unit went over to Yoni and said: “Don't stay too near the assault force. Remember you’re the commander of the Unit, and you can’t be hit.” Yoni smiled at him, and said: “It’ll be all right.”46 Then he shook hands with Muki.
Yoni went to the flight deck for a moment. The storm was behind them, and the sky was clear. Up ahead, it was already possible to see the runway lights at Entebbe. The strip was brightly lit for all to see, while the plane, flying without lights under cover of the darkness, was invisible from the ground. When the men on the flight deck saw the shining lights, there was a general feeling of relief — apparently no one was expecting them there. Shani carefully continued bringing the plane down. It could not touch down too hard, lest its excessive weight cause the landing-gear tires to burst. Meanwhile, the crew also carried out the routine for a radar landing, so that if the Ugandans suddenly suspected something and shut off the lights at the last minute, Shani would still be able to try to land the plane.
“Everything all right?” came Benny Peled’s voice from the airborne command center.
“A-OK,” Shani answered, carefully keeping the excitement in his voice under control because he knew he was being recorded. “No problems.”
From the flight deck, Yoni — along with Shomron and Vilna'i — examined the airport ahead. To the right of the runway was the new terminal, also lighted. Further away to the east was the old terminal, less distinct, though the lights were on there too. Yoni quickly returned to his men, and, after putting on his ammo vest, climbed into the front seat of the Mercedes. In front of him was the rear door of the plane. To his right, next to the window of the car, now stood Matan Vilnai, who had left the flight deck after him. Matan positioned himself near the side door, through which his paratroop commandos would leave to place the back-up lights on the runway.
The rear door now began to open, even before the plane touched down, and Yoni could see the black waters of Lake Victoria. He told Amitzur to start the Mercedes. The starter, which had been repaired at the Unit's base, did its job, and the engine came to life. Seconds later, they felt the jolt of the plane hitting the ground and could see the runway lights racing past them. Bukhris glanced at his watch. It was 11:01 p.m. Israel time — just after midnight on clocks in Uganda, the beginning of July 4,1976.
The plane quickly cut speed. When it reached the middle of the runway, the ten soldiers of the paratroop commando team leapt to the tarmac, one after another, as the plane continued moving toward the Unit’s deplaning point. At the same time the straps tying the vehicles to the floor of the plane were released.
Shani taxied to the access strip connecting the main runway to the diagonal, turned to the right, and brought the plane to a halt. He had delivered the Unit’s assault force to its starting point.
The signal was given to lower the ramp all the way to the ground. Before it had even settled properly on the asphalt, the Mercedes had already pulled out and turned right, alongside the plane, with the two jeeps behind it.
“I saw them pass under the wing,” says Shani. “The access strip was rather narrow, with a ditch running next to it, and I was afraid they were driving too close to us, and in a second the propeller was going to slice through the roof of the Mercedes. But they got by, and the three vehicles headed down the access strip and disappeared from sight.”
After the Mercedes had moved a little away from the plane, Yoni turned around to make sure that the two jeeps were following. He ordered the soldiers sitting in the back seat to maintain visual contact with them, and told Amitzur to keep going. They kept to 40 miles per hour, the speed to be expected of someone driving innocently across airport. Near them to the right, beyond a level field, was the new terminal building, awash with light. They were pulling away from il now and made a right onto the diagonal runway leading to the old terminal area.
The rumble of the plane’s engines, which had accompanied them through the long hours of the flight, quickly faded behind them. Near-silence descended; all that could be heard was the hum of their own engines and the whir of the wheels on the asphalt. The air outside was heavy with a warm, tropical humidity. The feel of the air, along with the high grass by the sides of the runway, through which the men could see anthills as tall as men in the glow of the headlights, brought home to them that they were in a strange, unknown land. But those, like Amir, who had allowed their imaginations to portray Africa as something exotic, a land of lions and crocodiles, now found themselves in a surprisingly mundane scene, remarkably similar to every other airport in the world, including the one they’d left at Lod.
Yet they were not at Lod, but in hostile territory, exposed and visible to anyone who bothered to look, and protected to no small degree by the very unexpectedness of their presence there. In his seat in the jeep, Ilan felt as though he were trapped and exposed by the burning headlights of his own jeep, which announced his presence to the world and lit up the vehicle in front of him. Next to him sat Amir, who looked at the men around him as the distance between them and the objective grew smaller and wondered: Which of them will still be standing on his feet five minutes from now? Shlomo sat in the same jeep. He now picked out at a distance the dim lights emanating from the old terminal area, and strained his ears to hear any sounds. As one accustomed by experience to recognize the sounds of gunfire and explosions as harbingers of trouble, he expected to hear at any moment the telltale shots marking the beginning of the massacre of the hostages. But for now the silence remained unbroken.
It took about a minute to reach the approach road that led to the old terminal. Amitzur signalled left before turning the wheel and pulling onto the road. It was important to nurture any seed of hesitation among the Ugandans who might be hidden in the dark, beyond the headlights of the car, so that they would not open fire and delay them. The si1houette of the high control tower even closer to them, grew ever larger.
Suddenly, two Ugandan sentries appeared, standing on the approach road in the headlights of the Mercedes, one on the right side and the other on the left. Through Bukhris’ mind flashed the image of the two “sentries” Yoni had posted in exactly the same place the night before during the simulation, and at that moment he knew: The mission would succeed.
The sentry on the left vanished back into the darkness, while the one on the right advanced toward the Mercedes. He now acted precisely as Amnon Halivni had told Yoni he would that morning. After stamping his foot and calling out a warning, the sentry raised his rifle to his shoulder and aimed it at the Mercedes. The metallic noise of a rifle being cocked could be heard. It was obvious to almost everyone that the sentry had assumed a menacing pose and was demanding that the vehicles moving towards him stop and identify themselves — or he would shoot.47 “I was sure the guard was about to fire,” says Rani, “no ‘ifs’ about it.” The Mercedes was about twenty yards from the Ugandan. Yoni instructed the men sitting next to the windows to ready pistols with silencers for action. It was for just such a turn of events that they had prepared at the Unit. “The guard had to be taken out,” explains Amir. According to the script, they were first to try to solve the problem, if possible, with silenced fire. “Yoni was calm,” recalls Amitzur, the driver. Yoni told him to approach the sentry on the left-hand side, and to slow down. The order was intended to reassure the sentry that they were indeed approaching him to identify themselves — and probably also intended to enable them to shoot more accurately. They closed in on the dark form of the soldier, who continued to aim his rifle at them. At the last instant, Muki shouted “Don’t shoot!” not believing that the Ugandan would actually fire on them.* But Yoni had no hesitation about what had to be done. As the Mercedes passed within a few yards of the sentry, Yoni gave the order to fire. The sentry looked surprised by what was happening. Both Yoni and Giora, who sat behind Yoni next to the right-hand window, opened fire with silenced pistols they thrust out the windows. The sentry staggered back and tottered. But even of the bullets had actually hit him, lie was apparently not out ol action.
The stillness was suddenly shattered by open, unsilenced fire. The source of the burst cannot be determined for certain; it may have come from one of the Israeli vehicles, or, according to some ot the men, from the sentry who had been fired upon, or even from some other Ugandan soldier. In any case, even if it was not the sentry who had first opened unsilenced fire, it was clear he had not been taken out by the pistols, and it was imperative that he be eliminated at once. “One does not leave behind an armed soldier.. .who would use his weapon once he realized what you were going to do,” explains Yiftah. Alex, who was sitting in the right-hand position in the rear seat of the Mercedes, thrust his pistol out the window as well, even though it had no silencer, and began shooting at the Ugandan, whom the Mercedes had passed by now. He fired six of the seven bullets in the clip of his Beretta and believes that the last bullets found their mark. Fire also came from the jeeps. The moment he heard unsilenced shooting, Amnon Peled opened fire with the machine gun mounted on the jeep, intending to finish off the sentry once and for all, as did others in the jeeps. The entire incident, from the first pistol shots to the elimination of the sentry, was over in an instant.
“We could not have approached the terminal building silently any closer than we did,” sums up Amir. “We started shooting heavy fire, and had we not done that, I’m sure they [the sentries] would have fired on us.”
With the first sentry eliminated, the second one reappeared. He was spotted running with all his might, but instead of fleeing into the darkness, he ran away from them on the asphalt, fully exposed, along the lights of the access road. He could not be left behind, since he could endanger the rear of the assault force. Bukhris, who was holding a machine gun in his hands, was given an order by Yiftah to open fire on him. Both the jeep from which he was firing and the Ugandan were in motion, and the first rounds missed the target. But then Bukhris laid a long burst in front of the Ugandan, and didn’t release the trigger until he saw the soldier run right into the flying bullets and fall.
During this seconds-long firefight, the Mercedes had leapt forward. The moment the silence was broken, Yoni told Amitzur to drive on at top speed. They were very close to the old terminal, with the control lower rising in front of them no more than 200 yards away. They covered the distance in a few seconds. As they approached, Yoni probably saw several armed Ugandans in the lighted entrance area of the terminal. It was obvious that the latest aerial photos had been correct and that the massive Ugandan security belt reported originally did not exist. Yoni may have spotted one or more of the terrorists, armed with AK-47S, outside near the entrance to the large hall.* No one opened fire on the Israeli force yet. Yoni quickly read the situation and ordered Amitzur to turn left, before the control tower, and park the car next to it. This was a different stopping point from the one that had been planned, which was twenty yards further ahead, between the tower and the terminal. Yoni’s assessment must have been that in this area, which was substantially darker than the plaza, the force would be less likely to be identified and less vulnerable to attack during the cumbersome process of getting out of the vehicles.
“Stop here,” Yoni ordered Amitzur, and the Mercedes instantly came to a halt, tires screeching. “Leave the engine running,” he said, and jumped out. The jeeps arrived right afterwards and pulled up behind the Mercedes. Men poured out of the vehicles in disorder as Yoni shouted at them to get out and storm the building. Not a single round had yet been fired as the first of them began to move toward the target, only a few dozen yards away. By now, any terrorist who had been outside must have moved into the hall. As the Unit’s men ran, they formed a triangle, at the head of which were Muki, Yoni and others, while the men who ran behind them gave the appearance ol a fan. A number of men were still climbing out of the vehicles. Muki, who ran first, a little ahead of Yoni, fired a few bursts, one or two of which were perhaps aimed at a terrorist who came out of the hall for a second. It seems that one of the terrorists in the hall shouted at one point to his comrades: “The Ugandans have gone nuts — They’re shooting at us!”48 At least for this first moment, the terrorist was fooled by the ruse that had been intended primarily for the Ugandan guards.
Within seconds, the spearhead of the force reached the beginning of the terminal beyond the control tower. Here Muki Betser pulled to the left, toward the corner of the building. He flattened himself against the wall and began firing into the plaza, and the entire force suddenly stopped behind him. Yoni, who was standing to his right in the open, shouted several times: “Betser, forward! Forward, Betser!”49 The delay that would lead to disaster, which Yoni had so feared, was taking shape before his eyes. To Shlomo Reisman, who was further back, the force appeared at that instant, in the dim light, like something strange and awesome — the soldiers crouched, leaning forward, in their mottled fatigues, with the round sighting lights jutting up from the barrels of their guns. “Forward!” shouted Yoni again, impatiently. The loss of a fraction of a second, especially when they were so close to the hostages, could have catastrophic consequences. “We knew,” says Amos Goren, “that it was a matter of seconds before the terrorists would recover their wits” and would start to shoot the hostages.
The delay, though, continued but a few seconds, for Yoni decided to take action himself. Yoni now lunged forward, presumably at the instant Muki ceased his fire, and bypassed Muki. “Yoni kept shouting to run forward, and I remember him running forward and passing Muki,” recalls Amos. “The one who was first out of the corner of the building was Yoni. Then he ran a little to the right, to let the men [who were meant to go inside the building] pass him.” “Once Yoni started to run, those who had hesitated ran too… He pulled the line with him,” says another soldier.50 The fan began moving again. Thus Yiftah, as soon as he saw Yoni begin to run past Muki, and understood what was going on, started running and also passed Muki.51 With another soldier running behind him, he burst through the first entrance of the building, which would lead him to the second floor.
At the same time, Amir arrived from behind, running fast. When he’d climbed out of the jeep, he’d looked for his commander, Amnon Peled, whom he was supposed to follow, but whom he hadn’t seen. Amir was convinced that Amnon was running on ahead of him, and he was afraid Amnon would charge into the building alone. In fact, Amnon had not yet finished extricating himself from the jeep, and was still at the rear. Amir began running as hard as he could, intending to catch up with his commander and reach his entrance as quickly as possible. To avoid being slowed down, he ran to the right and began to overtake the group of men behind Muki, while hearing Yoni’s urgent shouts of “Forward!” Up ahead, he could see the door he was supposed to enter, and he kept overtaking the others. “I didn’t care about anything else. I remembered what Yoni had told us, to run as hard as we could, and I ran as hard as I could.”
Right behind Amir was Amnon, who was straining to catch up with the man who was supposed to follow him. He didn’t even notice that the force had been held up, apparently reaching the edge of the building after Yoni had already passed Muki and the assault had resumed. It can’t be said for certain who passed the edge of the building and entered the lit plaza first — Yoni, or Amir and Amnon. In any case, by the time they were running along the front of the building, Amir and Amnon had almost certainly passed Yoni. Because of his role, Yoni now ran more slowly so he could watch the entire force and check what it was doing, probably turning his head back and to the left to see how the assault was taking shape. “Go in!” Yoni managed to shout while still running forward. Now Muki began to run again, with Amos Goren and another soldier from his team on his heels.
Perhaps about twenty seconds had passed since the cars had stopped. Amir, with his commander Amnon behind him, was first in the line of assault, some distance from the front of the building. After them were Muki and Amos Goren, hugging more closely to the building and running almost parallel to Yoni, who was several yards from the front of the building, in a more exposed position in the plaza. It is possible that Giora, too, had overtaken Yoni and was now ahead of him. The rest of the force had fanned out behind them. With Yoni, about a yard behind him, ran Tamir and Alik, the members of his command team.
At this point or a little sooner, a Ugandan soldier jumped out from behind some crates on the right. He aimed his rifle towards the force and apparently also managed to shoot, He was immediately eliminated by bursts of fire from several soldiers — just as the wide windows of the hall were shattered by gunfire from one of the terrorists, who had figured out what was happening and started shooting through the glass.
Amos now saw, from the corner of his eye, that someone to his right had fallen. It was Yoni. He had been shot in the front of his chest and in his arm, by a burst from an AK-47.52
Yoni had almost managed to reach the point he had designated for his command team to deploy, and may have already slowed down and turned his head to the left to look to check how the force was advancing. At the time he was hit, he was roughly in front of the first door of the large hall,53 and he probably had time to understand that Muki’s team, which was supposed to go through this door, was running past it. Yoni crumpled forward and turned around; then his upper body straightened again. His face twisted, his arms went out to the sides, and his knees folded under him. He sank to the ground, sighing, and sprawled on his stomach.
“Yoni’s wounded!” Tamir shouted. No one stopped to treat him, since his own orders had been that the wounded were not to be attended to until after the assault. The teams continued independently towards their respective objectives — parts of a machine that worked automatically, even without anyone in command, without a word from Yoni, who was lying immobile on the asphalt in front of the hall where the hostages were.
Amir was already opposite his entrance, the second door of the large hall, and had turned straight toward it. One of the terrorists was lying prone on the other side of the door and fired a short burst out of the hall from his AK-47. it may be that the gunman was not aiming at Amir, for if he was, says Amir, “I don’t understand how he could possibly have missed me.” Amir’s memory is of hearing Tamir’s shout that Yoni had been hit just before he charged into the room. In an instant, he spotted the terrorist’s hand and shot him through the open door as he ran, at a range of about five yards. He saw that the terrorist had been hit and finished off, and he ran into the building without pausing.
Just as he had practiced, Amir turned right as soon as hecrossed the threshold. Only then did he see that he was the only member of the Israeli force in the hall. But Amnon came in right behind him. Instead ol turning right himself, as had been planned, he decided on the spot to go left perhaps he realized that there was no one covering the entire left side of the hall, since no one had come through the first door. Amnon saw two terrorists to the left, a man and a woman, both prone or crouched on the floor. They had just come into the hall from the outside and had already had time to train their guns on Amir, who had run a short way into the room and had passed by without noticing them. But before they had time to pull the triggers, Amnon shot them both. He ran towards them, kicking the AK-47S away from the bodies. “Amnon, don’t advance!” Amir shouted, thinking he intended to move further into the hall.
After Amnon, Muki and Amos and another soldier from Muki’s team came in, all through the second door. Muki had run past the first entrance,54 to which he had been assigned, and Amos, who had been added to Muki’s team at the last minute and had been told on board the Hercules to stick to him no matter what, had simply followed his commander. After Muki entered the room, he shot at one of the terrorists that Amnon had already hit. The men now stood, weapons in hand, scouring the room for any movement. Suddenly, from the back of the room on the left, another gunman leapt up. Amos Goren opened fire and hit him in the chest, the bullets passing right through the shell of the AK-47 he was holding in his hands. 55
All four of the terrorists who had been in the hall with llie hostages, and had posed an immediate danger to them, had been eliminated. At that moment — seconds after Amir had killed the first terrorist, less than a minute after the force had encountered the Ugandan sentries, and about three minutes after it had rolled off the Hercules — the operation had essentially achieved success. It was a moment that Yoni, who had been hit only seconds before, never saw.
Meanwhile, men from the teams of Amnon and Muki, as well as from that of Amos Ben-Avraham, continued to pour in through the same door. Like those before them, they stayed close to the Ironl ol the hall at first.
Amir pressed the bullhorn to his lips and said in English and Hebrew: “Everyone down on the ground!” Had il not been for the bullhorn, his voice certainly would not have been heard, as he was so excited that he was barely able to gel a sound out of his mouth. Most of the people remained prone on the floor, probably more because of shock al what was happening around them than because of Amn’s instructions, but several of them did pump to their feel. Amnon and Amos Goren trained their rifles on a figure that rose in the far corner of the room, near the stairs. Even as they were squeezing their triggers, they realized that it was the figure of a little girl. They quickly jerked their guns upward. The bullets hit the wall above the girls head. It’s doubtful whether the small hostage understood that she had narrowly escaped death. A moment later an older man jumped up; the soldiers, realizing he was not a terrorist, shouted to one another not to fire at him.
But some were not so fortunate and were hit during the shooting. Three hostages lost their lives — two succumbing later to wounds sustained from Israeli fire; the third, Ida Borokovitch, killed on the spot, perhaps from the fire of one of the Arab gunmen.
IDF assessments before the operation had included the possibility of dozens of dead even in a “successful” operation. In fact, the swiftly executed assault caught the terrorists by surprise, and they had no chance to massacre the hostages. And conditions in the hall when the Unit’s men arrived were nearly ideal: It was well lit, all of the hostages were in one room, and in the first instant of the attack they were all still lying on the floor where they had been resting or sleeping — caught, like their captors, completely by surprise. So it was possible to hit the terrorists with lightning speed almost without endangering the hostages themselves, most of whom did not yet understand what was happening. Some had just woken up, and many were too stunned to even make a sound. Seconds earlier, when they had heard sounds of gunfire outside growing nearer, most had thought that their end had come and the massacre was about to begin. One hostage, Sarah Davidson, had thrown herself over her young son to shield him from the bullets, as the thought had flashed through her mind that it would not take long and death would come quickly.
Only one small boy reacted uninhibitedly to the Unit’s actions in the hall. When he saw the shooting, he clapped his hands and shouted with glee: “Wow, great! Great!”
Orders in Hebrew filled the hall; one of the soldiers announced, “We’ve come to take you home,” and the people began to understand that the inconceivable had indeed happened. After seemingly endless days of degradation, of repeated ultimatums and threats, of obedience to the orders of a shrill German woman whose brutality reminded one I lolocaust survivor of her block warden al Birkenau; after the “selection” of the jews, during which Ihe German man had tried lo calm them, jusl as his Nazi forebears once did, by saying that the sepaiation fromthe others was intended to improve their conditions; after days of listening to the pronouncements of the clown-tyrant of Uganda, luxuriating in the international spotlight and amusing himself at the expense of the group of hostages who had fallen under his authority; after days in which they had been exposed to the burning hatred of the Arabs, some of whom were just waiting for the chance to pull the trigger and murder the accursed Jews; after many of them already saw death as inevitable and inescapable — salvation had suddenly come, in the form of young Israelis emerging from the night.
Simultaneously, the other teams took control of the rest of the building. Giora burst into the small hall further down the building. This was where the Israeli hostages had been kept at first, and up until the moment he entered, it wasn’t clear whether they were still being held there. In a glance he saw there were no captives here and sprayed the hall and the corridor leading off to its right with bullets. In the hall there were several beds with sheets, and it seemed to him that someone was lying in one of them (the bed later proved to be empty). In front of him, on the single table in the room, were piled the hostages’ passports, and a number of suitcases stood on the floor. Giora sensed he was being fired upon from somewhere. When he had emptied his clip, he jumped back outside to replace it, since he was alone in the hall with no one to cover him. In the meantime, two soldiers from his team entered the hall and began advancing through it, firing. They reached a room that had been used as a kitchen on the far side of the hall, and when they had finished spraying it with bullets, they found two dead Ugandan soldiers inside.
Shlomo entered the small hall as well. He belonged to a different team, Amnon’s, which was assigned to the large hall, and he’d entered this room by mistake. He had known he was supposed to come through the door after the one Muki entered, and that’s what he did. But Muki had gone through the second door of the large hall rather than the first, and Shlomo ended up in the next hall. Han Blumcr, another soldier in Amnon’s team, did the same thing.
Even when lie was in the hall, Shlomo didn’t realize he was in the wrong place. “What are you doing our hall?” he asked Giora. And when he saw that the room was empty of hostages, he added: “They’ve probably moved them to the new terminal”
While he had been outside replacing his clip Giora had noticed that the team after his, Danny Arditi’s, was unable to penetrate the terminal through the entrance it had been assigned. Danny’s group was supposed to storm the VIP lounge at the far end of the building, which had served as living quarters for the terrorists. It was the team that ran last in the assault force, and as Danny had run along the front of the building, he’d seen Yoni sprawled out on the ground, with someone else stopped next to him. Danny paused for a fraction of a second, but when he heard someone nearby yell “Keep going!” he continued with his team toward their entrance. When they reached the door, they found it locked, and had difficulty breaking it open. One of Danny’s men tried throwing a grenade through a window, but it apparently hit the frame or a bar across the opening and bounced back, exploding nearby and lightly wounding one of the men in the leg. Giora, who had noticed a corridor leading from his hall to the terrorists’ quarters, shouted to Danny that he could enter his wing of the building and clean it out.
Giora and Shlomo entered the corridor, taking turns advancing while throwing grenades and firing continuously. Behind them was Tamir, Yoni’s communications man, who had been left with nothing to do after Yoni had been hit and had joined Giora’s team. While they were in one of the rooms, two people with frightened looks appeared out of the smoke. Their hands were lifted a little, as though they had not yet decided whether to raise them or not. The two moved toward Giora and passed by him. Shlomo began calling out in a mixture of English, Hebrew, and Arabic: “Stop! Who are you?” They didn’t respond, but kept moving.
“They’re terrorists!” Giora shouted to Shlomo, jumping out of his possible line of fire. “Shoot them!” Giora was unable to fire himself without endangering Shlomo, who was standing close to the two. So he yelled to Shlomo again: “Shoot them!”
Shlomo, still under the mistaken impression that he was in the vicinity of the large hall, answered: “No, they’re hostages!”
But as the pair passed him, Shlomo suddenly noticed a grenade clipped to one of their belts and realized who they were. Again, he ordered them to stop. When they kept moving away from him toward the door, he finally sprayed them with a burst of fire. As one of them fell, Shlomo saw the blue flash of a detonator. “Grenade!” he shouted, throwing himself to the floor of an alcove to one side and dragging down Tamir, who had been standing next to him. The grenade, which may have been hidden in the terrorist’s hand, exploded, but apart from Shlomo getting a tiny piece of shrapnel in his lip, none of the Israelis were wounded.
From there, they went on to clean out the area around the bathrooms, which was still full of smoke from a grenade that someone from Danny’s team had thrown in through a window. When the smoke cleared, it became evident that no one was inside. Searching back through the area they had already secured, they discovered the body of another terrorist in the corridor (Giora remembers there being two bodies). It is not entirely clear when he was killed, and by whose fire. Meanwhile, Danny’s men had succeeded in breaking in through a narrow window and mopping up part of the wing. Danny was assisted by Amos Ben-Avraham, who had been in the large hall but had seen earlier that nothing remained to be done there and had looked for another place where he could be of assistance.
While this was happening on the ground floor, Yiftah Reicher and his team were carrying out their mission on the second floor. In the initial assault, when Yiftah entered the first door of the building, he made sure that the other two members of his team were behind him; then, without waiting for his second team, under Arnon Epstein’s command, he immediately began executing his assignment. The three men quickly cleaned out the customs hall, killing several Ugandan soldiers, went out the other side of the room, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. When Yiftah reached the top ol the stairs, two Ugandans were headed toward him, but he opened fire first and killed them. At the beginning of the hallway they found the door to the platform overlooking the large hall, but it was sealed with a steel grill. Yiftah posted one of his men in the corridor to watch this door and the entrance to the second floor, while lie and Rani Cohen, his other soldier, continued mopping up. The end of the corridor opened into a large room that had once been a restaurant and now served as living quarters for the Ugandan soldiers. The room was full of blankets and sleeping bags. Only two minutes earlier, Ugandans had been sleeping there, but now no one was to be seen. They’d apparently made a lightning escape, leaping from the second floor window to the area behind the terminal.
Yiftah and Rani suddenly spotted the silhouette of a person and fired on it. When they heard glass shattering, they realized they’d fired on their own reflections in a mirror, just like in the movies. Afterwards they quickly returned to the hallway, and from there climbed several steps onto a large balcony that was actually the roof of the customs hall. They briefly searched it with their flashlights, but didn’t see anyone. Looking up, they could see the exchange of fire with the control tower.
When they returned to the hallway, Yiftah made radio contact with Arnon’s team. Arnon’s men were already outside again in the plaza, after having gone inside the building but had failed to locate the stairs to the second floor, over which they were supposed to stand guard. It’s easy to understand why they’d missed it, since the layout of this wing had been almost completely unknown to the Unit. Only at the last moment, at Sharm al-Sheikh, shortly after he had found out about it, had Yoni told Yiftah that to reach the staircase they had to cross through the customs hall to the other side of the building.
While searching for the stairwell, Arnon and his team shot several Ugandan soldiers that they ran into in a side room which Yiftah had not had time to clear. After combing the customs hall area and failing to find the staircase, they’d gone back outside. They could see that there was fire coming from the control tower, and Bukhris and another member of Arnon’s team began returning fire. They moved away from the front of the terminal so that they could shoot more effectively.
The covering force in the jeeps was also shooting at the tower. At first the men fired from where Yoni had ordered the cars to stop for the assault. Then they realized that they were in a poor position — from where they were, they couldn’t hit anyone shooting from the other side of the tower into the entrance plaza — so they drove out into the plaza. The stubborn Ugandan soldier who was posted on the the top floor of the tower continued shooting bursts throughout the entire operation, including the later stage when the hostages were being evacuated, and even afterwards. Fortunately, his fire was ineffective, in part because the counter-fire kept him from aiming properly, and no one was hit.
Now, a minute or two after the rooms had been stormed, Bukhris and Arnon spotted someone lying on his stomach further down the front of the building. They realized it was a member of the Unit who had been hit, and shouted “Someone’s wounded here!” as they ran toward him. Arnon turned over the wounded soldier, and then, in the light of the plaza, they saw that it was Yoni. “Doctor!” they shouted. David, who had positioned himself as planned next to the main entrance to the large hall, turned his head in the direction of the shout. He saw the wounded man sprawled on the ground a few yards away and came immediately. David’s rule was never to leave a wounded man where he had fallen, and he dragged Yoni, who was unconscious, closer to the building, behind a low wall. The new location, too, like the rest of the entrance plaza, was still exposed to fire from the control tower.
David heard Muki trying to raise Yoni on the radio. Right after the terrorists had been eliminated, someone had reported to Muki that Yoni had been hit, but Muki relates that he thought he heard Yoni himself calling him over the radio a few seconds later. He kept trying to call him back until David informed him on the radio that Yoni had been hit, and that he was treating him.
Yoni was very pale, and David noted other signs indicating massive blood loss. It was clear that Yoni was seriously wounded. He saw no blood on his clothing, other than on his right arm, where he had been hit in the elbow, and deduced that the hemorrhage was primarily internal. The doctor cut off Yoni’s ammunition bell and shirt with a knife, with Arnon helping him. At first he found only the exit wound left by the bullet on his back, near his thoracic spine. In spite of the good lighting in the plaza, he had a very hard time finding the entry wound; finally, he discovered a small slit under llie collar bone, on the right side of Yoni’s chest. The bleeding, then, was in fact internal, and nothing could be done to stop it. David realized that Yoni’s condition was almost hopeless.
Muki informed the entire force over the radio that Yoni had been hit and added that he was assuming command. Earlier, while the soldiers were still combing the large hall for more terrorists, one of the hostages, who had recovered from his initial shock, had come over to Mnki. The smell of gunpowder and the sharp odor of blood from the dead and wounded filled the room. “You’ve gotten all the ones that were here in the hall,” he said. “There are just a few more in the next wing.”
Those few more were the ones that Giora’s team, accidentally joined by Shlomo and Ilan, had already wiped out. After they’d finished securing what had been the terrorists’ living quarters, Shlomo had helped care for the wounded man from Danny’s team and Ilan had gone over to the large hall, to which he had been originally assigned. When Amir saw his friend coming through the door, he was overcome with joy. Not having seen Shlomo and Ilan, the other two members of his team, in the large hall, he had grown increasingly worried that they’d been hit on the way to the building in the first moments of the assault. Amir had already pictured the worst: that they were gone, just like the man from their squad who’d died in the Savoy Hotel rescue operation. Still, when Ilan appeared, Amir didn’t allow himself a display of joy. Instead, he picked up the gun of the terrorist he’d killed, and as gunshots from Yiftah’s team echoed from the second floor, he said with a big smile: “Look at this great new AK-47 I got myself.”
Coming downstairs after securing the second floor, Yiftah ran into more Ugandan soldiers, and shot them. Outside again, he joined Arnon, who headed the second team under his command. Along with several of his men, Yiftah now began cleaning out the long corridor that ran between the customs hall and the large hall and opened onto the northern entrance plaza. All that had been known in advance about this corridor, which actually led to the inner area of the terminal complex, was the little that Halivni had told Yoni at Lod.
Bukhris remained crouched next to the building, ready to fire again if need be at the control tower, which was quiet for the moment. Suddenly he felt a tap on his back and heard a few mumbled words he did not understand. He turned his head and saw the barrel of a rifle only inches from his face. At first, confused by the mottled uniform, he thought the man holding the gun was from his own force. But when he saw black skin, he shouted: “Watch it, Arnon! There’s somebody here!” The Ugandan leaning over Bukhris apparently still hadn’t fully grasped what was going on around him. Perhaps he had gone over to Bukhris because he was confused himself by the uniforms and by Bukhris’ swarthy skin, the darkest in the Israeli contingent. Arnon heard Bukhris shout, turned, saw the Ugandan with his rifle pointed at Bukhris’ head, and shot him.
With that, the contingent of the Unit that had landed in Hercules One had finished securing the old terminal and the area around it. The immediate threat to the hostages and the troops had been eliminated, except for the potential hazard still posed by the control tower. The Unit’s second task, assigned to its contingent in the four armored vehicles, was to provide peripheral defenses around the terminal. That force, under Shaul Mofaz’s command, landed in the second and third planes, and arrived several minutes after the shooting began, as the assault group was mopping up in the building. Along with it, Shomron also arrived in his command jeep.
When the second plane touched down six minutes after the first, the runway lights were still lit. Mofaz saw them from the flight deck as the plane descended, and could also identify Yoni’s vehicles moving toward the old terminal and see the start of the shooting near the building. Biran was on the same plane, sitting in Shomron’s jeep, and as the plane was making its descent, he was also looking out a window. “We’re close to landing,” Biran recounts. “The strip is nicely lit. I can see the airport over the right wing, and by the lights and other things, I can locate all the landmarks I’ve planned to look for beforehand. I know, that by the time we land, the force is supposed to be at the objective, and that if I see shooting there while we’re coming in, it’s a sign that the mission has been accomplished. If our forces are there, I’m not worried — somebody’s dealing with the problem. It’s right before we touch down, and sure enough, I see out the window that bullets are flying in the old terminal area, and I know this operation’s already wrapped up. That is, the guts of the operation have already been carried out before we even got there.”
Dan Shomron, along with Lt.-Col. Haim Oren and three other officers from his forward command group, had arrived with the Inst plane, and until the second Hercules landed with their jeep, they waited near the new terminal. They had gotten off the first plane close to where the Unit’s Mercedes and two jeeps had been put down. This was also where the main force of paratroops had deplaned to head for the new terminal on foot. The five officers remained alone in the open, near the access strip connecting the main runway to the diagonal one. During those minutes, as they awaited the arrival of theeir jeep and the first two APCs, the scene seemed surreal — senior Israeli officers standing next to each other in the darkness, in the middle of an airport in Africa, while an operation unfolded to which they were able to contribute virtually nothing. “Dan and I stood on I the edge of the runway, with no one around you had your UZI, nothing else, ”says Haim. “I said: ’Dan, what are we doing here? The other planes haven’t arrived, the Unit’s already cleared out, and we’re standing here at the end of the runway…” The sound of the Unit’s run-in with the Ugandan sentries could now be heard in the distance, and Haim suggested to Shomron: “Let’s move up landing the other planes.” But Hercules Two was already about to touch down.
After the plane landed, Nati taxied it towards the set deplaning point further down the runway. From inside the hold, Biran could see an airport pickup truck driving on the left. It had left the airport’s fire station and begun driving alongside the plane, on a service road parallel to the runway, with the light on its roof flashing. When the plane reached the turn onto the connecting strip where the forces were to deplane, the lights on the Ugandan vehicle suddenly went out. The next moment, perhaps as a result of a message from the vehicle to the control tower, all of the lighting in the area went out in three quick stages — the landing lights on the principal runways, the lights along the access road to the new terminal, and the lights in the parking area for planes — as though someone had flipped three switches. The lights went out just as the third Hercules was making its final approach and preparing to put down. For the pilot, before whose eyes the runway lights abruptly vanished, it was as if the ground had disappeared from under his feet. He skipped about half a mile forward in the air, toward the two short rows of faint lights that had been positioned earlier by the paratroops. Using these, he was able to land safely, albeit with a resounding bang.
Meanwhile, Nati brought Hercules Two to a stop on the connecting strip where Yoni and his men had put down earlier. Shomron’s jeep and the two APCs quickly rolled off the plane. Biran hurriedly assembled the antenna for the jeep’s radio, and Lt.-Col. Moshe Shapira from the Infantry and Paratroops Command, who was serving as driver, picked up Shomron and the other four officers where they were waiting nearby.
The command jeep joined Shaul’s two APCs and headed for the old terminal area. Not far behind was the second pair of APCs, under Udi’s command, which had landed in the third plane. Shanl moved as fast as possible, having seen from the air that shooting had broken out even before the assault force had reached the terminal and fearing that the operation had run into trouble. When he reached the plaza in front of the old terminal, he saw the hijacked airliner standing there. The presence of the plane here surprised the Unit, since, according to the latest intelligence reports, it was positioned at the end of the diagonal runway. In fact, the gunmen had ordered Capt. Baccos to move it earlier that day, possibly in anticipation of the press conference they planned for the next morning to celebrate Israeli capitulation to their demands. Shaul positioned his APC next to the Air France plane, tried to make radio contact with Yoni, and was told Yoni had been wounded. Inside the terminal, the assault force had almost finished mopping up.56 “There were still some shots here and there,” says Biran, who arrived at the same time in Shomron’s jeep, which parked under the control tower.
Shaul saw some Ugandans running past but didn’t bother shooting, since the plan said his force should not fire at soldiers trying to escape from the area around the building. For the moment there was no fire coming from the tower; soon after, when the shooting from the tower erupted again, Muki ordered Shaul to keep the soldier up in the tower pinned down. Shaul deployed in front of the tower, lit it up with a floodlight on the APC, and poured machine gun and RPG fire on it.
“We fired everything we had,” says Danny Dagan. “Even though I was the driver, I grabbed my AK-47 and shot every chance I got, because I felt like I had to do something. I’d get an order: ‘Danny, forward!’ or ‘Back up!’ and I’d put my gun down and drive. And in between, I was shooting the whole time.” Shauls fire was directed mainly by Alik, who’d stayed at the position he was meant to take as part of Yoni’s command team, in front of the terminal.
The second APC of Shaul’s pair passed close to the terminal. Omcr, the commander, tried calling Yoni on the radio to see if he needed help; when he got no reply, he continued according to plan toward the Ugandan army base and the Migs.
When the other two APCs, which were responsible for the defenses north of the building, reached the terminal area, they turned left into a compound that had belonged to Shell Oil. From there, they were supposed to find their way into the open stretch on the building’s north, which had once been the entrance area for people arriving at the terminal from Entebbe on the old road. When the men in the APCs found a fence blocking their way, they doubled back toward the control tower to look for another way through. They coilld see the Mercedes in front of them, its doors thrown open and its engine running. They turned left again, and after a few attempts, managed to find their way onto the north side. In the process they fired on some Ugandan soldiers who appeared to them to constitute a threat. They also fired on the generator that supplied electricity to the terminal, knocking out most of the lights in the terminal itself and the area around it. At last they deployed in front of the gate where the road from Entebbe entered the terminal area. As planned, they began calling loudly to anyone who might be in the vicinity to come to them, in case some of the hostages had fled there in panic during the battle. From there they spotted Yiftah and a few of his men, who were combing the area, and the two groups shouted to each other to avoid friendly fire. After that Yiftah cut back through the building to its south side, where the freed hostages and the rest of the assault force were located.
In the meantime, Muki went out to check on Yoni’s situation, then returned to the large hall to begin organizing the evacuation of the hostages. Alik asked the doctor about Yoni’s condition, and David replied grimly that it looked very bad. Earlier, when David had just begun treating Yoni, Alik had warned him: “If you don’t take care of him right, you’ll have to settle the score with me.” Alik had no idea how David, who was new to the Unit, would perform under fire, and thought that saying this might increase Yoni’s chances of getting proper care. Alik now entered the large hall and offered to relieve Muki there, in order to free him to take charge of the rest of the operation. Instead, Muki asked that Alik go to the fourth Hercules plane, which had landed by now, and which was to carry the hostages home. He wanted the plane moved closer to the terminal, perhaps having been told by radio that it had parked further away than planned.
Alik took Ilan with him, and the two began walking toward the diagonal runway. For a moment fire rained down on them from the control tower, and they pressed themselves against the wall of the building. A few steps further along, next to the tower, they ran into Shomron and, in response to his question, explained where they were going. Then they walked away from the terminal along the access road, only twenty minutes after they’d raced down it in the opposite direction after meeting the Ugandan sentries. They asked over the radio that the Golani contingent guarding the plane be told they were coming so they wouldn’t be fired on by accident. The two men walked carefully, guns at ready, on guard in case a Ugandan soldier leapt out at them from the high grass. On the way, Alik told his partner that Yoni had been wounded in the chest.
As they passed the point where they’d clashed with the sentries, they saw the body of one of the Ugandans sprawled on the asphalt. After a short walk, they reached the plane and the Golani troops spread out around it. The job of the sixteen Golani officers and men was to serve as a reserve force and to help evacuate the hostages. Alik and Ilan told the pilot to pull closer to the terminal, and headed back to the building.
By the time they got back, Yoni had been evacuated. Before he was moved, Dr. David Hasin had dressed the wounds on his chest with vaseline gauze and bandages, mostly to mark them for the doctors who would treat him on the plane. Without the help of the medic whom Yoni had taken off the mission roster at Lod, there was little more David could do, and he preferred in any case to move Yoni quickly to the plane, where there would at least be some chance, however slight, of saving him.
The blood continued to flow from his veins, and with it Yoni’s life was ebbing away. Yet a last spark remained. When David and Arnon were loading him onto the stretcher, “he regained semi-consciousness,” David recalls. “Apparently his soldier’s reflexes were stirred. There was tremendous shooting at the tower, which made a lot of noise, and he tried to get up.’”57
Shaul walked over from his nearby APC to the entrance plaza to help organize the evacuation and saw Yoni being treated. Danny Dagan, who had asked him to take the first opportunity to check on Yoni’s condition, got back a faulty report third-hand via another soldier that Yoni was “moderately” wounded.
David asked Shaul to call over one of the jeeps from the covering-fire team to evacuate Yoni. Hostages had already begun to gather outside, and some of them jumped into the jeep to be taken to the plane. After a brief exchange of words, the hostages got out and Yoni was lifted up on the stretcher and put in their place. Rami, commander of the covering force, drove the jeep to the plane. David couldn’t go with Yoni himself since he’d begun treating other wounded The drive was very short. On the way Rami heard Yoni mumble something he couldn’t make out.
The medical team from the fourth Hercules had spread out on the runway about fifty yards from the plane. The doctors and medics had begun preparing to receive the wounded the minute the rear gate of the plane had opened. Now they saw a jeep approach, drive past them, and stop at the plane itself. The members of the resuscitation team — two doctors and a senior medic — ran from their position to the ramp of the plane, and began right there to treat the soldier who’d been brought to them. Acting automatically, they administered CPR, with Yoni’s ammo vest still hanging on one shoulder. Dr. Eran Dolev, the head of the plane’s medical team, rushed over, and saw that the wounded man was Yoni — and that he’d suffered near-total blood loss.
The central venous line was in place and blood was being pumped in, but to no avail. Yoni had passed the point of no return. After a while the two resuscitation-team doctors looked at each other, knowing there was no hope.
“There’s nothing we can do here…” one said to Eran.
“Keep working! It’s Yoni!” he answered.
As the hostages had begun emerging from the hall, another burst of fire had come from the tower. Shaul’s APC had responded with heavy fire once more and silenced the tower again. The evacuation resumed, with Shomron pushing the men to work as quickly as possible and wrap up the mission. Most of the hostages were still in shock and had not so much as uttered a word. Muki instructed them to leave their belongings and begin to evacuate the hall. Most did as they were told and hurried outside through the two doors. But some refused to part with their luggage and carried it with them. One even went back inside the hall to collect his duty-free bags. From where Rani was crouching at the doorway of the customs hall, he could see the freed hostages pass on their way to the plane. Most of the lights in the area had gone out when the generator was hit, but the huge flames leaping from the Migs at the nearby air base, along with the light from mattresses set afire by bullets, allowed everyone to sec what was happening. Rani could not help but be amazed by the way hostages doggedly insisted on bringing their bags with them. Amos Ben-Avraham, who was assigned to counting the hostages, told Muki that there was no way he could provide an accurate number.
The hostages were shuttled to the plane on the jeeps. Occasionally they quarreled over spots on the Land Rovers, but for the most pari they remained orderly. Despite the terrible crowding, though, some insisted on pulling their suitcases onto the jeeps. “Muki shouted at them to leave the bags, but when he turned his head they picked them up again,” recounts one soldier. “What mattered to them most at that moment was the bags.”58 Amitzur remembers driving a “pile of people” to the Hercules. His gun had been shoved somewhere under them, so that he wouldn’t have been able to use it even if he had needed to.
Inside the hall, Amnon called Amir over to explain something in English to a pair of hostages — in fact, the pilot of the Air France plane, Capt. Michel Baccos, and the French flight engineer. Amir told them the procedure to follow, as set in the briefings before the operation: Leave everything, put on your shoes, and go to one of the exits, from which you’ll be taken to the plane.
But the flight engineer couldn’t find his shoes. “He looked around, lifted the mattresses, picked up the blankets, and just couldn’t find them. It was dark, there was noise and shooting, and the poor guy was sure we were going to leave him behind,” recalls Amir. “Then somebody told me they were bringing the plane closer…so I said to him: ‘Forget the shoes, just go to the door.’”
He did — but a soldier standing at the doorway saw him approach barefoot and told him to go back and put his shoes on. The flight engineer went over to Amir again.
“Even at the time I could see how funny the whole thing was. I was just twenty-two, and he was a flight engineer on an airliner, responsible for 300 people. And he says to me, like a kid talking to his kindergarten teacher: ‘But he told me to put on my shoes!”’
Finally the farce ended. The flight engineer found his shoes somewhere and proceeded to the plane, properly shod.
When only a few hostages remained in the hall, Amnon again called Amir over and asked him to talk to another hostage who didn’t speak Hebrew. “She was a young woman, maybe one of the stewardesses, without much clothing on because it was very hot there at night. She said to me in english: ‘I’m wounded.’ I asked her to show me where she’d been hit, and she showed me a small wound from a ricochet. ‘It’s nothing,’ I told her, ‘ You can walk ’ ‘No’ she said, ‘I’m wounded somewhere else.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Here,’ she said. She pointed to her inner thigh, but refused to show me what was wrong battle was raging a second before, but what mattered to her was that I wasn’t supposed to look. So I looked anyway, without her permission, and said to her: ‘It’s just another ricochet, and it’s nothing. You can walk. We can’t carry out everybody who feels like being carried. Please go to the door. It’ll be okay.’”
But the woman reacted hysterically, “almost went into a coma,” as Amir puts it, and refused to stand. In the end, Amnon ran out of patience. “Come on, just get her out of here,” he told Amir.
“I threw her over my shoulder, like in the movies: the heroic soldier carrying the girl out in her slip in the middle of the night. I went outside, and suddenly a bullet flew by my head. It was the only time in my life that I heard one whistle by close like that, and it was really scary. I made a quick calculation: If it was some soldier who ran three hundred yards away and was shooting from there, then it was just luck that the first bullet had come so close, and the next one would be ten feet off. But if they were shooting from the tower, thirty yards away, then the next bullet would be in my head. I said to myself: I’m not going to die because of her stupid stubbornness. I pulled her around so that, if they shot again, she’d take the bullet. The funny thing was that I saw her later on TV, and she said: ‘Everyone had forgotten me, except for one soldier, a hero, who saved me and carried me out.’”
Through all this, Omer and his men had been alone on their APC near the Ugandan military base. When they’d arrived, the area had been absolutely quiet. Omer had thrown on the APC’s floodlight, swept the area with it, and spotted the Migs they’d been told to expect. The planes were lined up in two rows, five Mig-21s to the south, and three Mig-17s to north. When Omer saw that the operation was going as planned and that the evacuation of the hostages was beginning, he asked Shaul’s permission to open fire on the Migs, as Yoni had instructed him to do at Sharm al-Sheikh. “Wait,” said Shaul, “I’ll find out if you can shoot.”
Shaul tried to raise Shomron, but the radio link with him was very poor. Just at that time, Yekutiel Adam was informing Shomron from the airborne command center that the Migs should be destroyed. Amnon, who picked up the order on the radio, passed it on to Haim, who conveyed it to Shomron. Shomron, though, told them he was busy with the evacuation, and not to bother him about the Migs right then.
So Omer, ironically, got no answer — and decided by himself to destroy the planes, since he knew from Yoni that there had been a decision in principle to hit them. He strafed the Migs with machine gun fire, one after another, punching holes in them from one end to the other. Two or three exploded, producing gigantic flames that lit up the entire area. Shomron, who saw what was happening from a distance and could not understand why Omer’s men were shooting at the planes, succeeded in getting Shaul on the radio and asked him about it. Shaul was at a loss what to answer. But Adam’s order had been carried out, even if it had not exactly gone down the proper chain of command.
The first hostages reached the Hercules transport shortly after Yoni did. The medical team was still working on resuscitating Yoni by the ramp of the plane, and the dazed hostages trampled past them on their way into the hold. But that minor disturbance no longer made a difference in Yoni’s condition. The two doctors stopped their efforts. Yoni had slipped from life, and there was no way to bring him back. His body was brought up to the front of the plane. There it was laid on a stretcher and covered with an aluminum medic’s blanket.
The entire airport had already been secured, including the area of the main runway, from which Hercules Four would take off in a few minutes with the freed hostages.
The new terminal, which dominated the runway, had been taken by the paratroops at the outset of the operation. They had deplaned from Hercules One on foot, immediately after Yoni’s Mercedes and two jeeps had left, and advanced a short way toward the new terminal, coming to a halt in the wet grass some distance from the building. From there they could make out the Unit’s three vehicles heading toward the old terminal, until they finally disappeared from sight. The paratroopers spread out facing the building, prepared to respond if they were fired upon, and waiting tensely for the distant shots that would herald the beginning of the action at the old terminal. That would be their signal to charge into the new terminal. The structure was well lit inside and out,and the plaza in front of the entrance appeared completely deserted Vilna’i, the commander of the force, spotted an external staircase near the entrance and pointed out to one of his officers that he should climb it to the roof when the assault began.
The sound of gunfire, from the Unit’s skirmish with the sentries, was heard, and the paratroopers began running toward the new terminal building. Surin didn’t bother waiting for his team’s commander — the officer to whom Vilna’i had just spoken — but rushed inside the main hall with the other soldiers. Surin’s team had been assigned to go up to the roof of the building; not knowing about the order to use the outside staircase, he searched the hall for the stairs leading to the top of the building. Several Ugandan civilians, looking extremely surprised, sat watching silently, without interfering with what was happening around them. Nehemia, Surin’s battalion commander, sent several men to the second floor, and Surin went with them.
They found the floor nearly deserted. Through a wide window, Surin saw the members of his own team climbing the external staircase to the roof. There was no way of reaching the stairs from the second floor, and his friends signaled from the other side of the window that he should go outside and come around to join them. When Surin came out the main doors of the building, he saw Matan Vilna’i standing there and heard the distant sound of gunfire from the old terminal. Until now, everything had been quiet in the new terminal; not a shot had been fired. Any civilians who tried to escape were caught and brought inside the main hall where the rest were being held. As per orders, Surin had cocked the Israeli-made Galil rifle slung from his neck, but had left the safety on. The order to leave safeties on had been given because here, in the new terminal, it was expected that the soldiers would run into civilians and probably not encounter any soldiers. Surin rushed to the external stairs at the corner of the building, intending to catch up with the rest of his team, and climbed them at a run. The staircase was built around a square column, so that for someone going up one side, the column partially hid the next side.
As Surin reached the level of the second floor, he suddenly found two Ugandans, a man in police uniform and a woman, coming down the stairs toward him. The man immediately aimed his pistol at Surin and, without hesitating a moment, fired twice at a range of barely three feet. The first bullet missed, but the second hit Surin in the neck. The couple continued fleeing down the stairs as Surin crumpled on the steps. Because the encounter was so sudden and the safety of his Galil was still on — itself a sign that he hadn’t expected to use his weapon — Surin never had a real chance of firing first. The Ugandan’s two shots were the only ones fired at the new terminal, but for Surin they marked the start of a life sentence.
When he heard the gunshots, Matan Vilna’i rushed up the stairs with the doctor from his command team, apparently after the Ugandans had already escaped. The first thing they saw was the Galil lying on the stairs. A few steps further on they found Surin sprawled on the staircase, blood running from his neck and staining the floor.
Surin was fully conscious but unable to speak. When he realized that he also couldn’t move his hands or legs, he understood that the bullet had hit his spinal cord. But he did not yet grasp how severe the injury was, or that it was permanent. Only later would it become clear that the price the operation had exacted from him was higher than almost any that can be paid.
Between the old terminal and the Hercules, the Land Rovers continued shuttling back and forth, carrying hostages to the plane. The Golani force’s Peugeot pickup was also pressed into service, and several Golani soldiers came to help out with the evacuation.
Dr. Ephraim Sneh, the chief medical officer of the Infantry and Paratroops Command, and the Golani force’s doctor also arrived at the terminal. The Golani doctor joined David in treating the wounded in the entrance plaza. David recalls finding it extremely hard to concentrate on what he was doing — not because of the tension of battle, but because of the deafening bombardment of the control tower by the cover force.
By then, some of the hostages had set off for the plane on foot in several groups, escorted by members of the assault force and Shanl’s APC. On the way, Shaul was careful to keep the APC’s floodlight trained on the tower, hoping to keep the Ugandan soldier there from lifting his head and shooting at the hostages.
When one of the groups of hostages neared the plane, Amnon,, who had led them, pointed at it and said: “There it is.” Without another word spoken, they took off and ran toward the plane. Golani troops were fanned out on either side of the rear gate to funnel panicky hostages into the hold and keep them from running into the tall grass.
As the Hercules quickly filled with hostages, the Golani men tried to count them, as they’d been told to do. After Michel Baccos came aboard, he saw Yoni’s body, wrapped in the aluminum blanket. “Who’s that?” Baccos asked a soldier. “One of the officers,” he replied. “He’s dead.”
The freed hostages, crowded into the belly of the Hercules, stood in silence. Perhaps only now did they grasp that they were leaving the hell they had entered a week before when their plane was seized over the Mediterranean. During that week, many had come to accept that their end might be drawing near. Yitzhak David, who thirty-one years earlier had been rotting in a Nazi concentration camp, now lay wounded in the hold of the Israeli plane. Freed from his new deathtrap, he would be flying to safety within minutes. At the time he didn’t know that only a few feet separated him from the body of the man who had commanded his rescue.
The stretchers were arranged in two tiers, fastened with straps to the walls of the plane. On one lay the body of Jean-Jacques Maimoni, a hostage who had been fatally wounded when he jumped to his feet during the assault, and on another, above him, lay that of Ida Borokovitch, hit by a bullet in the heart. On the upper tier on the left was the soldier from the Unit who’d been lightly wounded in the leg. Another stretcher held Pasco Cohen, who had been hit in the pelvis. When David had treated him outside the large hall, he had still been fully conscious, and after Cohen was transferred to the evacuation plane, the medical team had even succeeded in stabilizing his condition somewhat. But it later deteriorated, and the doctors were unable to save him.
One of the freed hostages, Ilan Har-Tuv, came over to Dr. Dolev and said that he didn’t know whether he should fly home or stay at Entebbe. “My mother was taken to Kampala Hospital yesterday after a piece of meat got stuck in her throat,” said an extremely worried Har-Tuv. “Maybe I should stay to make sure she’s safe.”
“If you stay,” Dolev told him, “they’ll kill you for sure. But an elderly woman like your mother has a good chance of being left alive.”Dolev was wrong, at least on the second count. Hours later, on the morning after the raid, Idi Amin’s soldiers took Har-Tuv’s mother, Dora Bloch, from her hospital room and killed her in cold blood. She was 75 years old.
Freed hostages and casualties filled the plane, and the pilot, Halivni, who wanted to clear out as quickly as possible, asked his load master to report how many of the hostages were on board. The man replied that all the hostages were on the plane, but Halivni insisted that he give him the number on board in writing. The load master wrote on a slip of paper, which was then handed to Halivni, that there were 93 hostages and the bodies of two more on board. Halivni asked for a more specific report, including the names of the dead, since, according to the figures he had received, there were supposed to be 106 hostages at Entebbe. Now the man listed, on the other side of the paper, the names of those who had been killed: Ida Borokovitch and Jean-Jacques Maimoni, and at the bottom of the list a third name: Lt.-Col. Yoni. Even after repeated counts by the Golani men, the number of those on board didn’t line up with the number of known hostages. But the hostages themselves were convinced — correctly — that all 106 hostages, except Dora Bloch, were on the plane.
Halivni stood up from his seat for the first time since leaving Sharm al-Sheikh and went to the rear of the plane to see the hostages and casualties. On the top tier of the stretchers lay the wounded soldier from the Unit — the only member of the Unit’s assault force who returned alive on the same plane as the hostages. After the first few minutes of the action, the hostages had not gotten a chance to see the others. Halivni laid his hand on the wounded man’s shoulder. The hostages were packed in front of him, most sitting, a few standing, all with eyes staring into space. Amid the hostages were scattered the Golani men, the medical team, and members of the air force crew. Because of the crowding, Halivni could move only a few feet further along the wall of the plane. The silence was almost complete.
Halivni was immediately able to identify Michel Baccos because of his white uniform and pilot’s insignia, and he gestured to Baccos to come over to him.
“You’re the Air Fiance pilot? Halivni asked in broken French.
“Yes.”
“Is your whole crew here”
“Yes. But what about my passengers.”
“They’re all here,” Halivni told him. “Except for Dora Bloch. We have to take off right away.”
Halivni spoke briefly with some of the passengers, including Uzi Davidson, who had served with him in the reserves, and then returned to the flight deck and asked permission to take off. From the flight deck, he could still see bursts of gunfire from the exchanges with the control tower, and could only hope that none of the bullets would reach his plane. “We’re sitting there, with the engines running, and tracers are flying in all directions,” recalls Halivni. “And what’s a plane, after all? It’s a mass of tubes and wires and cables, and anything can happen to it. And this one thought went through my head: God help Israel — let the plane go without being hit.”
Halivni received the go-ahead for takeoff. Twenty-six minutes after he had stopped the plane near the old terminal, minutes that had seemed to him like an eternity, Hercules Four pulled away, leaving the shooting behind. Halivni rolled down the diagonal landing strip to the main runway, turned onto it, and began to speed south. The plane quickly passed the new terminal and rose into the air over Lake Victoria. It was 11:52 p.m., Israel time. Only fifty-one minutes after the first plane had landed, the hostages were on their way to freedom. Halivni quickly cut east, towards the Kenyan border. Within a short while, the plane was far from Entebbe, and far from any real danger.
After the old terminal had been combed thoroughly, and Muki had verified that there were no more hostages in it, the withdrawal of the Unit’s assault force began. One of Shlomo’s jobs was to make sure that no one from the force was left behind. In his hand was a list of all the names, written on a piece of cardboard. He stood on one of the jeeps, and began reading the names aloud. When a soldier responded, he put a mark by his name.
“Yoni Netanyahu,” called Shlomo when he reached the middle of the list, and waited for an answer.
“He was wounded,” someone called out. “They took him to the plane with the hostages.”
Only then did Shlomo recall what he had suppressed from his consciousness for the past hour — how he’d seen Yoni sink to the ground in front of him during the assault. Shlomo continued calling out names.
When the roll call was over, the assault force drove to the parking area before the new terminal, where the other three planes waited. There they boarded Hercules One, which had brought them to Entebbe.
Until then, Shani and his crew had remained seated on the flight deck, with flak jackets and helmets on. In the other two planes the crews had also remained sitting. All three planes had arrived at the parking area before the terminal early in the operation, but only after running into some trouble that almost ended in disaster. After landing and letting the force deplane, Shani had rolled down the taxiway toward the parking area. Suddenly, he came to an unexpected turn. According to the diagram in the Jeppesen guide, the taxiway was supposed to lead directly to the parking area at the new terminal, without turns. The lights on the runways had already been turned off, and in the darkness it was extremely hard to make out where the taxiway led. Shani and Einstein stopped the plane for a moment so that they could examine the dark ground before them. Nati, who had landed by then and was taxiing along the same route a short distance behind them, did not know that they had been held up. Suddenly he saw the silhouette of an aircraft fill his windshield, and he quickly jammed on the brakes. When his plane came to a stop, its nose was only a few yards away from the tail of Shani’s plane. In the end, Shani and Einstein succeeded in identifying the correct route and continued taxiing to the parking area. Nati followed, as did Aryeh, the pilot of the third plane.
The air crews waited impatiently for any word of how the operation had gone. The ridge of the hill on which the new terminal stood hid the old terminal from view, but through the windows they could see tracers flying at a distance. “My feelings were grim,” says Einstein. “Within a very short time, tremendous amounts of fire began spewing from there. I’d never seen anything like it. I’d expected a few bullets at most. Now I was sure a catastrophe was unfolding.” In fact, the battle for the control of the building had already been won, and the tracers the pilots saw came from the exchanges with the control tower and from shooting by the Uint’s pelipheral defense force.
In the meantime, the refueling team had connected the pump to one of the fuel ducts scattered around the parking area. It had taken a while, but in the end the team members reported that they were ready to start pumping fuel into the plain. Just then, though, word arrived from the airborne command headquarters that approval had been received to land in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi and refuel there. So it was decided to do without refueling at Entebbe, especially since filling all four planes’ tanks with one pump would take hours.
From the parking area, the crews of the three planes could see the silhouette of Hercules Four lift off the ground with the hostages on board. “That was the climax,” says Shani, “because it was clear the operation had succeeded. Of course problems, at least minor ones, could still crop up, but we’d know how to take care of them. The essential thing was that the civilians for whom we’d performed the raid were free.”59
Nearby, the airmen noticed, another Hercules was parked, not one of theirs. It was Idi Amin’s plane. Only a few hours earlier it had brought him back from the Organization of African Unity summit meeting in Mauritius, where Amin had been greeted ceremoniously by U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. The Air Force men decided that if one of the Israeli Hercules were hit, they’d take Amin’s plane in its place. Between them, they divided up the tasks involved in taking control of the plane and flying it.
The Unit’s peripheral defense forces began pulling out. Shaul Mofaz ordered the APCs to leapfrog toward the planes, with one pair covering the other’s retreat and tossing smoke grenades behind. As they withdrew, Omer scattered explosives that had been prepared at the Unit’s base. They were set to go off about fifteen minutes later, to keep the Ugandans from approaching the area by the new terminal where the forces were gathering at the planes.
Now, though, an order came from Yekutiel Adam to Shaul to check the Air France jet parked in front of the old terminal and make sure there were no hostages on it. The Golani soldiers’ count of the hostages on the evacuation plane was still less than the number known to have been in the terminal, raising doubts about whether everyone had really been evacuated. Shaul left Udi’s APCs standing guard, and headed back with his pair, carefully skirting the explosives already on the asphalt.
To the north Shaul saw the headlights of a pair of vehicles approaching on the old road from Entebbe, apparently carrying the company of reinforcements posted in Entebbe. It’s likely that they had no idea what was causing the commotion at the airport. The first vehicle began blinking its lights on and off. Shaul positioned his APC on the access road facing the Ugandan force, switched off his lights, and waited for it to come closer. When the vehicles came within about two hundred yards, he opened fire. The lights on the Ugandan vehicles went out, either because they’d been hit or simply because they’d been fired on, and the Ugandans stopped abruptly.
Suddenly, the shooting from the control tower began again. Shaul’s men fired back, silencing the tower as they moved toward the Air France plane. When they reached it, Omer climbed up the stairs positioned outside the plane, and shone a light through the windows. It seemed absolutely empty. Shomron passed Shaul an order from Yekutiel Adam not to enter the plane, in case it was booby-trapped. He also ordered him to fall back to where the Hercules were parked after he finished inspecting the airliner.
Hercules One had already taken off, at 12:12 a.m. Israel time. During the withdrawal and the takeoff of the first two planes, the air crews were informed that a Ugandan combat jeep, equipped with a small recoilless artillery piece, had been spotted and destroyed on a hill south of the new terminal. It couldn’t be ruled out that other such vehicles were in the area. There wasn’t much the air force men could do about this, of course, other than hope that no one tried to shoot at them. The jeep had been discovered by a group of six paratroop commandos, whose assignment had been to seize the new control tower and then secure the surrounding area. After leaving Hercules One, along with the four commandos responsible for putting the back-up lights on the runway, the six had headed for the tower. On their way from the runway to the hill where it stood, they had run into a steep incline, which they’d been forced to climb with a rope. From the top they had spotted the empty combat jeep and tossed a grenade into it. When they’d reached the new control tower, they’d found it dark and deserted.
Hercules Three, carrying Udi’s, APCs, now stood ready for takeoff on the main runway. Nati, onboard Hercules Two, was still waiting in the parking area for Shaul’s pair of APCs to arrive. Worried about being left alone at the airport with no way to get his men out if he were hit or a problem developed with the plane, Nati had delayed Hercules Three’s departure until he was also ready to take off. Finally, the second pair of APCs arrived and rolled onto Nati’s plane Standing outside, Biran transmitted the final report from Shomron command jeep, informing the airborne command center that he was cutting off contact, and took down the antenna so the jeep could be loaded onto the plane. The jeep, and with it the last of the Israelis at Entebbe, drove up the ramp and onto the plane.
Now, with everyone on board, Hercules Two left the parking plaza of the new terminal and turned toward the main runway. It was pitch dark outside, and Nati almost drove into a ditch by the side of the taxiway. But the plane managed to reach the runway safely, where it joined Hercules Three. The two planes took off, one after the other. It was 12:40 a.m. when the last Israeli plane rose into the air, an hour and thirty-nine minutes after the first plane had landed at Entebbe.
Those who looked back at the ground below could see the flames still leaping from the burning Migs and the two glimmering rows of portable lights, all that testified to the existence of the otherwise darkened airport.
Aboard Hercules One, now flying toward Kenya, the Unit’s men and the paratroop commandos were seated again. The men from the Unit knew Yoni had been wounded. Most were not yet aware of how serious the injury had been, and none knew that he was dead.
Surin had been placed in the center of the plane, on a stretcher laid across two seats of a jeep. Both David and the doctor from the paratroops treated him and tried to lift his spirits. One of the doctors told him how successful the operation had been, and about how few casualties there were. It would be several weeks until Surin’s ability to speak returned. Unable to respond, he nevertheless understood what he heard and regretted only that he had spoiled the operation’s impressive statistics.
It was quiet on the plane. As usual after a successful mission, there was no immediate rejoicing, only a sense of released tension, and perhaps even a kind of emptiness. Here and there soldiers exchanged a few words.
After about an hour, Hercules One landed in Nairobi. The talk on the plane had gradually grown freer as the men began recounting various parts of the operation among themselves. They were ordered not to leave the plane, but when the rear gate opened, several soldiers went outside anyway and stood by the side of the Hercules. Around the planes were posted armed Kenyan soldiers. For the first time since leaving Sharm al-Sheikh about ten hours earlier, Shani shut down the engines of the Hercules.
After a little while, the Unit’s men were joined by Ehud Barak and Shai Avital, the officer who had fought by Yoni’s side on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War. The two had been waiting in Nairobi and had already been to the hostages’ plane, which had landed first, and confirmed what they’d heard earlier — Yoni was dead. “I pulled back the blanket covering his body,” says Ehud, “and I saw the white face, pale, strikingly handsome — Yoni’s face.”60
On board Hercules One, Ehud now stood among the men of the Unit, about to tell them of Yoni’s death.
“On the plane there’d already been endless chatter, everyone telling his stories about what had happened to him,” says one of the soldiers. “It seemed that everything was going great, that we’d succeeded. And then someone came in and said that Yoni had died.. .that he was gone. All at once, it was as if someone had turned off the entire plane. Everybody went silent… We were hit hard, and each of us withdrew into himself.”61
Danny Dagan sat outside on the wheel of another plane, crying softly.
Amos Goren was sitting with his eyes closed in the front passenger seat of the Mercedes, trying to get some sleep. He didn’t know of Yoni’s death. When Ehud came and saw him sitting there, he said, “Do you know you’re sitting in Yoni’s seat?”
“Yes,” Amos answered, not knowing why Ehud was asking.
Ehud apparently now noticed the puzzled look in Amos’ eyes. “He’s dead,” he told him.
Matan Vilna’i left Hercules One, and went over to the hostages’ plane to see the people for whom the operation had been carried out. “I saw Yoni’s body lying in the plane, wrapped in one of those awful aluminum blankets the doctors have. I saw the hostages inside, and they were completely stunned, shadows of men. They were very depressed. And what hit me then was this kind of a feeling that was, for an army man like me, tota1ly illogical — that if Yoni was dead, then the whole thing wasn’t worth it.”
Surin and the other wounded were transferred to an airborne hospital that had landed in Nairobi during the night. It was an airforce Boeing 707, loaded with all the equipment needed to set up field opearting room. Some of the women and children among the hostages were also moved to the Boeing Jet to save them. The long flight back to Israel about the turboprop transports pasco cohen was rushed to the operating room in Nairobi hospital, but two hours after the opeartion, he died. Yitzhak David was taken to Nairobi hospital as well, and after surgery he was out of danger.
The stopover in Nairobi was short. Yekutiel Adam, whose airborne command center had landed at the same time as the hostages’ plane, ordered that the stay in Nairobi be kept as brief as possible, and that the planes take off again for Israel the moment they were refueled. Hercules Four, which had been the first to land in Nairobi, was also the first to depart, at 2 a.m. Israel time, carrying the freed hostages and the bodies of the dead. The other three planes took off one after another, each making its own way to Israel, without trying to stay in formation.
In Chief of Staff Gur’s office in the Kiryah, radio equipment had been set up, and there and in Defense Minister Peres’ neighboring office, cabinet members and senior officers tensely followed reports from the airborne command center. When word came through that the hostages had left Entebbe, and then that the entire force was over Kenyan territory, tremendous relief was felt in the two rooms. The gamble — in which the stakes included not only the lives of the hostages and soldiers, but also the future of many of those in the room — had paid off. At midnight, just after the hostages left Entebbe, Gur phoned Peres in the office next door to tell him the operation had succeeded. Everyone in Peres’ office went over to Gur’s room.
A report also came in that Yoni had been wounded. “They said to me: ‘You hear? Yoni’s been hit,’” says Ben-Gal. “I knew there was another soldier named Yoni in the Unit, and I said: ‘Yes, but it’s not the big Yoni, it’s probably the little Yoni.’ Everyone was running around, worried, very upset… For some reason, I was sure it wasn’t the Yoni I knew, and I kept saying: ‘It’s the little Yoni. It’s not our Yoni.’”
When the planes left Kenya, though, there was still no report of any dead among the Israeli forces. “When the last plane took off from Nairobi,” says Rachel, Gur’s secretary, “there was this wave of rejoicing. The chief of staff’s driver brought in a few bottles of champagne from somewhere, and everyone celebrated. In the end, they left. It got quiet, and Motta was left alone in the room with I Hagai Regeb. I went to the kitchen to make some coffe. Suddenly, the other secretaries came over, grabbed me and said: ‘Yoni’s been killed.’ It was clear which Yoni they meant. I dropped everything and went to the chief of staff’s office. I opened the door of the room I’d left two minutes before, when it had been full of happiness over the success, one that hadn’t even involved casualties…and I saw the chief of staff sitting, face fallen, terribly sad. Not to mention Hagai, who was just crushed. In one minute, all the joy had been erased… It was as though nothing else mattered. Everything took on different proportions.”
It was Ehud who had notified Gur, by phone from Nairobi.
Gur went over to Peres’ room, where the defense ministei had lain down to rest. “He got up to open the door,” says Gur. “When he heard, he was in complete shock. First of all, it took him by surprise because we’d already celebrated, not knowing about Yoni’s death. Second, I could see he was taking it personally. He said,‘My God,’ or something like that, and took it very hard — not like a delense minister hearing about an officer who’s been hit.”
In his diary, Peres wrote: “At four in the morning, Motta Gur came into my office, and I could tell he was very upset. ‘Shimon, Yoni’s gone. A bullet hit him in the heart. Apparently, it came from the control tower…”*
“This is the first time this whole crazy week,” Peres wiole, “that I cannot hold back the tears.”
Avi was at the Unit’s base. During the day, after attending the pressing meeting for which he’d stayed behind, he’d gone to an intelligence base and followed the operation from there until one in the morning, when the news came that the last plane had left Entebbe. Then he drove to the Unit in Yoni’s car. Instead of going to sleep in his room, he lay down in his office, to be near the phone. At 4 a.m., it rang and woke him. The officer at the other end told him that Yoni had been badly wounded, and that it wasn’t clear what condition he was in. A few minutes later, another call came from the same man, saying that Yoni was dead.
Dazed Avi walked out of the office. Outside, the first faint streaks of dawn showed in the sky; all was silent. Avi crossed the drill area to the switchboard room.
The Unit’s secretaries, unable to sleep, had stayed up by the switchboard the entire night. They knew Avi had just been on the phone.
“What’s going on, Avi?” they asked when they saw his face.
When he told them Yoni had been killed, they burst into tears.
Instead of driving to the airport himself, as he and Yoni had agreed he would, Avi stayed at the Unit and arranged to have vehicles sent to pick up the returning soldiers. “It was sad. The fact that Yoni wasn’t going to come back made the operation — I don’t want to say a failure — but turned it into something else, making it very hard to define as either a success or a failure,” says Avi. “The objective had certainly been achieved, but even though no one had thought it could be done without casualties, nobody had expected that along with success, the mission would bring us Yoni’s death. It was just unacceptable. Everybody’s life is precious, but there’s no getting around that it’s different when the commander of the unit, the one who led the force, is the one who was killed.”
The flight back to Israel lasted many hours. Aboard Hercules Four, the freed hostages sat almost without moving, without getting up, hardly even going to the lavatory. At the front of the plane lay the bodies of the dead, which probably contributed no small amount to the gloom that settled on those who’d just been given back their freedom. Moreover, the shock of everything they’d been through had not yet worn off. After several hours in the air, one of the women raised her hand. Dr. Sneh went over to her. From underneath herself she took something she’d been sitting on until then, and Sneh saw she was handing him a bandolier of mini-grenades. He guessed that the belt had fallen from Yoni’s stretcher when it was being moved to the front of the plane. Several of the pockets were open, so that the grenades could be quickly pulled out and used. But none was actually empty.
Michel Baccos sat up front on the flight deck, at Halivni’s invitation. Thinking of the dead he’d seen, he felt little happiness over his release.
Halivni had gathered from the few words he’d exchanged with the hostages that they held Baccos in high regard, and during the flight he thanked him for the way he and his crew had related to them.
“I don’t understand what you’re thanking me for,” Baccos responded. “It’s my job to take care of the passengers. I don’t expect any thanks for that.”
Aboard Hercules One, some of the men from the assault force and the paratroop contingent slept. Others sat quietly, absorbed in their thoughts, and a few talked among themselves from time to time, mostly about what had happened during the action. There were those, too, who freely expressed their happiness to have succeeded and to be on their way home, safe and sound. Dr. Hasin sat by himself, his face filled with sadness over what he’d seen, and over his own failure to defeat death despite all his efforts. His mind refused to rest even for a moment, refused to put everything behind him. Again and again, he went over the steps he’d taken to treat the wounded. Had he done everything necessary, everything possible, he asked himself.
During the flight, the crew members turned on the radio to pass the time — and were amazed to hear a report on Israel Army Radio about the raid on Entebbe. They reacted angrily, since they had yet to make the long journey above the narrow band of international water between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, during which they would be completely defenseless against any bid to intercept them. Later, when the soldiers and crew heard Idi Amin’s announcement that he had “reconquered” Entebbe airport, they broke out laughing.
Early in the morning, the Israeli Phantom jets that were to escort the transports home appeared before them. It was a welcome sight for the members of the squadron, to all intents and purposes marking the end of the operation for them.
Only after they reached Israeli airspace did the hostages begin to show any signs of recovery and rejoicing. At 9:43 a.m., their plane landed at Tel Nof Air Force base. Dr. Dolev disembarked holding Yoni’s ammo vest, which he had slashed behind Yoni’s strectcher while still at Entebbe. He looked for someone from the Unit to whom he could hand it, and found Amiram Levine who, it would turn out, would replace Yoni as commander of the Unit. Later, when Amiram reached the Unit, he would extract from the vest a flattend AK-47 round from the burst that had taken Yoin’s life.
The hostages were taken to a briefing, at which they were asked not to tell the media anything about how the rescue had been executed. Afterwards they returned to the Hercules and flew to Lod, where a huge reception awaited them. As the crowd sang, danced and waved flags, the hostages descended from the plane, surrounded on all sides by reporters and photographers. Halivni waited with his crew on the plane until the hostages dispersed, and with them the cameras. Then they too emerged from the plane. Outside, Halivni ran into Foreign Minister Yigal Allon.
“The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming,” Halivni began to recite from Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s classic Hebrew poem, “In the City of Carnage,” about the helplessness of Jews during the brutal 1903 Kishinev pogrom and the world’s indifference to their plight. But instead of reciting the next line, “And the butcher has slaughtered,” Halivni pointed and said: “And the flag of Israel flies above.”
Allon began to weep.
The other planes landed at Tel Nof. Shani came back from the flight deck and walked toward the door on the side of the plane. “We had more or less the same people on board, sitting the same way as when we’d set out, except reversed, with the Mercedes facing forward. The first person to come aboard the plane when we landed was Rabin, looking very agitated. I was the first person Rabin talked to, and the first question he asked me was: ‘Where’s Yoni?’ He wanted to see the body for himself.”
The Unit’s men left the plane. When Muki came out, Peres turned to him and asked: “How was Yoni killed?”
“He went first, he fell first,” Muki answered, without elaborating.62
There was a great commotion outside, and Danny Dagan said to Amitzur: “Come on, let’s get out of here. Let’s take the Mercedes and go.” Amitzur drove, with others from the Unit crowded in the back. When he reached the base, Amitzur parked the Mercedes and turned off the engine. Later, when they would try to start it again, the starter would not respond, despite repeated efforts. Danny got out of the car, and saw Brig.-Gen. Avraham Arnan, the Unit’s founder, who had been waiting at the base for them. Arnan asked Danny to tell him how it happened that Yoni had been killed. Danny related what little he knew: that at Entebbe he had received a report, passed on from Shaul, that Yoni had been moderately wounded, whereas later he heard that he died on the plane. “The two facts just don’t fit,” said Danny. Just at that moment Dr. Hasin arrived and passed by them, crestfallen. Avraham and Danny went over to the infirmary, where they found the doctor unpacking his equipment and putting it away. As though unable to accept that Yoni, whom he’d loved, was dead, Arnan began interrogating David, thinking that perhaps he had not done everything he could have to save Yoni, or had made some error. David, grim-faced, explained that he had never reported that Yoni was moderately wounded — that he had understood immediately that his commander’s condition was critical and had done what he thought was necessary. After several minutes, Arrian’s questions ended. The death of the man he’d fought to have appointed commander of the Unit, and whom he’d seen as continuing his mission, was an incontrovertible fact.
“What Avraham did,” Yoni once said of Arnan, “was something absolutely unique. To take the initiative and build a new unit, of a kind that had never existed before, to build it from scratch in spite of all the immense difficulties, is an accomplishment that few things can rival.” Now, Arnan left the infirmary with a heavy heart, he walked along the paths of the base, the place where he had chosen, years ago, to build his unit. It had been his pride and joy, and his attachment to it never wavered. That evening he would drive to jerusalem to meet with me. From my apartment he went to our parents’ house. A year earlier, Yoni had offered to let him live in the house, which was empty while our parents were abroad. Arnan had accepted. The street, Haportzim, was named for the battalion that had captured the neighborhood in the 1948 War of Independence; Arnan, then only seventeen, had served in that battalion. Now fortyfive, Arnan knew he was suffering from an incurable illness and that his own life was drawing to an end.
The officers and men were filled with contradictory feelings satisfaction over their momentous achievement and their returning home, and sorrow over the loss of the commander who had led them to Entebbe. The event was still fresh, and deeper thoughts would come to most of them only days or years later.
“When we reached the base, I wasn’t the slightest bit happy” says Amos Goren. “Those of us at the Unit were completely removed from the whole festival that followed the operation, and removed from all the publicity… What I, and many others, felt was hollowness.”
In one of the rooms in the cluster of offices, some of the support staff had gathered. Through the open door, they could see the returning soldiers climbing out of the APCs. Naturally, some of the men were quite happy. Then one of their officers arrived and announced: “The commander’s gone.” The men were speechless. Among them was Avi R., the mechanic who had repaired the alternator of the Mercedes on Friday. Like many other members of the support staff, he had known Yoni for years.
“Yoni liked me a lot, and I don’t really know why,” says Avi. “Once when he was deputy commander of the Unit, I came into the mess hall after having stayed up late working. There was this wild group of drivers that we had then, and they were sitting around one of the tables. I sat down at the table behind theirs. Yoni was there in the mess hall, too, at the officers’ table. No one else was around. I was eating my supper, and the drivers started throwing olives at me, into my plate. ‘Come on, enough,’ I said. It didn’t help. I warned them: ‘Once more, and I’m dumping this plate on you.’ They kept it up, so I took the plate, with everything on it, and threw it at them. One of them deflected it, and it fell to the floor and broke.
“I went outside. After a few minutes, Yoni came out, too. He said to me: ‘Come here, Avi, I want to talk to you,’ and he took me aside. ‘You shouldn’t behave that way, throwing plates around,’ he said. He spoke in a very quiet tone, not scolding at all, but in a way that was meant to teach you something. With Yoni, everything was done with a human touch. ‘Go to the supply room,’ he said in the end, ‘and sign for a 1065.’ I went over there, and of course they laughed at me. ‘A 1065? You want to sign for a plate? Get out of here.’”
Now, Avi was broken-hearted. Looking outside, he couldn’t fathom the joy being shown by some of the men returning from Entebbe. Within the room there was silence. The members of the support staff — the drivers, the cooks, the mechanics — hung their heads. At that moment, an officer passed by the door, and what he said to them as he went by increased Avi’s pain tenfold.
“What’s all the mourning?” he called out. “So what, another one bites the dust.” Then he continued on his way.
It was the same officer I’d heard disparaging Yoni a year earlier when I’d come to the unit for the change-of-command ceremony.
Toward evening, when the officers and soldiers were about to go home, the Unit’s new commander, Amiram Levine, handed Amitzur a pouch from Yoni’s ammo vest, full of grenades. One or two had been punctured by bullets from the burst that had hit Yoni at Entebbe, and had to be exploded. Amitzur took a demolition block and went out into an open field. The cloth model of the old terminal that the soldiers had stormed the previous day under Yoni’s direction had already been dismantled. The setting summer sun cast its waning light on the nearby buildings, the trees, the asphalt of the base Amitzur dug a small pit in the hard earth, put the pouch in it and placed the demolition block next to it. Moving back, he unrolled the detonation wire. He stopped a safe distance away and crouched.
When he squeezed the detonator, the block exploded A small cloud of smoke arose, and with it came the loud blast of the exploding, grenades, which only the night before, during the assault at Entebbe, had hugged Yoni’s body as he went into battle.
Notes
* Judging by his testimony, Muki at that moment was under the misconception that the Mercedes was just by the control tower, while in fact it was some 200 yards away from it. He seems to have lost all conception of the subsequent ride from that point to the tower.
* The terrorists did not linger in the hall where the captives were held, but would come in to observe what was going on and leave after a minute or two. They guarded the hostages from outside, standing in the open area next to the terminal. Jusl seconds before the first shots were heard, one of the hostages, Ilan Har-Tuv, looked through the glass front of the hall and saw them having a lively conversation with a Libyan doctor and the manager of the civilian airport. Even though the hall was brightly lit, it was possible from inside to see clearly anyone in the outside area, since it was also lit. According to the hostages, there were also Ugandan soldiers outside, some of whom sat in armchairs. Another hostage, Sarah Davidson, remembers that the moment the first shots were heard, she saw the leader of the terrorists stand up from the low stone wall where he was sitting, grab his AK-47, and turn in the direction of the shooting.
*Actually, in all likelihood, Yoni was not hit by fire from the control tower. See below, p.230, n. 52.