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Great Daring Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan September 28, 2020 31 min

Josip Broz Tito - World War II — Yugoslav partisans wading across a river. Wikimedia

8. A Daring Rescue

A chartered Air France Boeing 747 carrying the released non-Israeli and non-Jewish hostages, taking off from Entebbe airport to Paris, France. Special Forces Magazine

In the wee morning hours of July 4^th, 1976, Israeli special forces carried out a daring raid on Entebbe airport in Uganda. The goal was to rescue hostages taken from an Air France jetliner. The plane had been commandeered on June 27^th, while en route from Tel Aviv to Paris, after a stopover in Athens where it was boarded by four hijackers. Two were from a breakaway faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the other two were from a German Red Army Faction revolutionary cell. Seizing the airplane, the hijackers diverted it to Entebbe airport in Uganda, whose president, Idi Amin, was sympathetic to their cause.

Once landed at Entebbe, the hijackers removed the passengers from the airplane to a disused airport terminal building. There, they were joined by another three accomplices. After sifting through the passengers’ passports, the hostage takers released those who were neither Israeli nor Jewish, and kept as hostages 94 who were, plus 12 members of the Air France aircrew. In exchange for freeing their hostages, the hijackers demanded the release of 40 prisoners held in Israel, plus another 13 held in other countries.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.