90 MINUTES

June 27, 1976. Air France Flight 139 took off from Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, bound for Paris via Athens. It was a routine flight — the kind of uneventful journey that most passengers sleep through. Two hundred and forty-eight people were aboard: tourists, business travelers, families heading home. After a stop in Athens, the plane lifted off for France.

It never got there.

As the aircraft climbed over the Mediterranean, four hijackers moved. Two were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-EO), led by Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann — both Germans, members of the Revolutionary Cells (Revolutionare Zellen). Two were Palestinians. They had smuggled weapons aboard at Athens. Within minutes, they controlled the cockpit and declared the plane was no longer going to Paris.

The hijackers diverted the plane to Benghazi, Libya, for refueling, then banked south and east across the continent, deep into the heart of Africa. On June 28, Air France Flight 139 touched down at Entebbe International Airport in Uganda. And there, under the eyes of Ugandan soldiers loyal to dictator Idi Amin — a man who had openly declared his admiration for the Palestinian cause — the real hostage crisis began.

The world watched. And for seven days, no one knew what to do.

At Entebbe, the hijackers moved the passengers from the plane into the old terminal building, a squat concrete structure that had been out of service since a new terminal opened. Then they did something that turned an already terrifying situation into something that reached back across thirty years of history: they separated the passengers. Jewish passengers and Israelis were taken to one room. Non-Jews were told they were free to go.

The selection. For Jewish passengers, many of whom were old enough to remember the Second World War, the word hit like a physical blow. The non-Jewish passengers were eventually released and flown out. What remained were 106 Israeli and Jewish hostages, locked in the old terminal under armed guard, attended by Ugandan soldiers who made no pretense of neutrality. Idi Amin visited personally, shook the hijackers’ hands, and gave speeches supporting their cause.

The hijackers issued their demands: the release of 53 Palestinian and pro-Palestinian militants held in prisons in Israel, France, Germany, Kenya, and Switzerland. If the demands were not met by July 1st, the hostages would begin to die. Israel’s official policy was that it did not negotiate with terrorists. But 106 human beings were sitting in a room in Uganda with guns pointed at them. The policy was about to be tested like never before.

The Israeli government publicly stalled, asking for an extension of the deadline while secretly doing something else entirely: they were planning a rescue. And the planning would have to be flawless. There was no margin for error at 2,500 miles.

The Israeli Defense Forces’ planning team worked around the clock. They had former hostages to debrief once the non-Jews were released. They had intelligence from Mossad. They had architects who had worked on the original Entebbe terminal. They built a replica of the old terminal in Israel and rehearsed the assault. They had one week.

Operation Thunderbolt — later renamed Operation Yonatan in honor of its fallen commander — was breathtaking in its audacity. Four Lockheed C-130 Hercules aircraft would fly from Israel, hugging radar-dead zones along the African coast, and land at Entebbe without authorization. No warning. No diplomatic cover. Just four enormous transport planes appearing out of a dark African night and touching down at a foreign country’s international airport.

The lead assault team, Sayeret Matkal — Israel’s elite special forces unit, roughly equivalent to the British SAS or U.S. Delta Force — would ride in the first plane. Their commander was Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu. Thirty years old, a veteran of the 1967 and 1973 wars, a man who had written letters home about the strange feeling of leading soldiers into places where the cost of failure was measured in lives. He understood the stakes better than anyone.

The audacity of the insertion plan was almost impossible to believe: the commandos would drive off the plane in a black Mercedes-Benz limousine, preceded by two Land Rovers. Idi Amin drove a black Mercedes. The hope — barely more than a prayer — was that Ugandan sentries, seeing headlights approaching in the dark led by a black Mercedes, would hesitate for a crucial few seconds, assuming it was Amin arriving for a late visit. A few seconds was all they needed.

July 3–4, 1976. The four C-130s lifted off from Sharm el-Sheikh in Israel and turned south into the darkness. They flew low over the Red Sea and down the East African coast, staying below radar coverage, navigating by dead reckoning and skill. No radio communication that might alert Ugandan air traffic control. No lights visible from the ground. Just four enormous propeller-driven transports threading through the dark at 250 knots, carrying 200 commandos and enough equipment to fight a small war.

The flight took seven hours. The first aircraft landed at Entebbe at 11 p.m. local time without permission, without announcement, while a scheduled British Airways flight was using the airport. The tower briefly queried the unknown aircraft. No one answered. The C-130 rolled to a stop and the rear ramp dropped.

The black Mercedes rolled down the ramp, headlights on, followed by two Land Rovers. It drove slowly toward the old terminal, 500 meters away. A Ugandan sentry stepped out. He saw the Mercedes. He hesitated — just as Netanyahu had hoped — but then raised his weapon. A commando silenced him with a suppressed pistol. Another sentry raised an alarm.

The operation shifted from stealth to speed. The commandos sprinted to the terminal doors, shouting in Hebrew and English: “Get down! Get down! Israeli army!” They burst through the doors. The hijackers, surprised but not paralyzed, opened fire. In the chaotic, terrifying seconds of the firefight, all seven hijackers were killed. Three hostages, tragically, also died in the crossfire — one had not dropped to the floor fast enough, one was caught in the initial burst, one was shot by a commando who mistook him for a terrorist. The speed and violence that made the rescue possible also made those deaths unavoidable in the noise and darkness.

Fifty-three minutes after landing. The old terminal was secure.

While Sayeret Matkal cleared the terminal, other commando units raced to Entebbe’s military side of the airfield. They destroyed eleven Ugandan MiG-17 and MiG-21 fighters on the ground — ensuring Uganda could not pursue the C-130s during the withdrawal. Ugandan soldiers who tried to resist were engaged and killed; approximately 45 Ugandan military personnel died in the firefight at the airport.

The hostages, many still in pajamas, some injured, all in shock, were hustled across the tarmac and loaded into the waiting C-130s. The aircraft engines had never fully shut down. Within minutes of the terminal being cleared, the planes were rolling again.

But in the darkness outside the terminal, during the brief, violent moments after the assault force had entered and before the perimeter was fully secure, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu was shot. A Ugandan sentry positioned on the roof of the control tower had fired. Netanyahu was hit in the back as he turned to direct the evacuation. His men carried him to the aircraft. He died minutes later, on the runway of Entebbe Airport, having completed his mission.

He was the only Israeli commando killed in the operation. He was 30 years old. His younger brother, Benjamin Netanyahu, would go on to become Prime Minister of Israel. The operation was renamed Operation Yonatan in Yoni’s honor — and every year on July 4th, Israel remembers both the birthday of its greatest ally and the day its commandos flew to the end of the world and brought 102 people home.

The C-130s stopped to refuel at Nairobi, Kenya — arranged secretly in advance — then flew north back to Israel. They landed at Ben Gurion Airport to scenes that defied description. Thousands of people had gathered on the tarmac through the night. When the planes appeared in the dawn sky, the crowd erupted. Hostages stepped off the ramp and collapsed into the arms of family members who had been told they might never see them again.

The reaction around the world was extraordinary. In the United States, newspapers ran banner headlines. The United Nations Security Council debated whether Israel had violated Ugandan sovereignty — while most of the world privately acknowledged that Idi Amin’s complicity with the hijackers made the question almost irrelevant. Idi Amin, humiliated beyond measure, lashed out at the Kenyan community in Uganda in the days that followed. A British-Israeli hostage, Dora Bloch, who had been moved to a Ugandan hospital before the raid, was murdered by Ugandan agents in retaliation. She was 75 years old.

Operation Entebbe became the gold standard for hostage rescue operations. Military planners around the world studied it. The SAS, Delta Force, GIGN, GSG-9 — every elite counter-terror unit that was built or reformed in the decade that followed drew lessons from what Israel had done in 90 minutes at the edge of the world. The bold insertion. The precise intelligence work. The rehearsal on a replica set. The layered security tasks. The absolute prioritization of speed over caution.

And at the center of all of it, the memory of a young colonel who got off a plane in Uganda and ran toward a building full of terrified people — and never came home. Yonatan Netanyahu gave everything he had for 102 strangers who weren’t strangers at all. In every generation, in every army, there are people like that. Entebbe just happened to show the whole world what one of them looked like.