For the survivors of Operation Entebbe, marking the 50th anniversary was less a celebration of one of Israel’s most mythologized military operations than a reckoning with the distance between the country that rescued them and the one that failed to prevent another mass hostage crisis decades later.
About two dozen of those rescued at Entebbe and their relatives gathered on Monday at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in Jaffa for an event honoring Sorin Hershcu, the Israeli paratrooper gravely wounded in the 1976 raid. Teasing and jokes repeatedly broke through the formalities, giving the room the feel of an unruly extended family.
The hijacking began when an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris carrying 246 passengers was seized after a stop in Athens by terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Germany’s Revolutionary Cells. The plane was diverted to Uganda, where the despotic, notoriously unhinged dictator Idi Amin gave the hijackers safe haven. They separated Israeli and Jewish passengers from most of the others, who were released over two days.
On July 4, Israeli commandos flew thousands of miles to Entebbe and rescued more than 100 hostages in an audacious raid that became one of Israel’s defining military operations.
To mark the 50th anniversary, Israel released previously classified protocols from the raid, later renamed Operation Yonatan, after Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother and the operation’s commander who was killed during the mission. (Uganda’s military chief Muhoozi Kainerugaba in February announced plans to erect a statue of Yoni Netanyahu at the airport in the exact spot where he was killed, saying it would strengthen his country’s “close blood relations with Israel.”)
'I wanted to look evil in the eyes'
The documents, including cabinet minutes and phone records, show the government abandoning its longstanding policy of not negotiating with hostage-takers even as it prepared the military rescue.
Most of those at the anniversary gathering were the so-called children of Entebbe, the youngest hostages from the raid now in their 50s and 60s who still meet regularly. Three of them — Benny Davidson, who was 13 at the time, Shay Gross, who turned 6 in Entebbe, and Tzipi Cohen Gonen, who was 8 — had just returned from their first trip back to Uganda, where they visited the old Entebbe terminal in which they had been held at gunpoint for a week.
Cohen Gonen’s return to Uganda meant going back to the place where her father, Pasco Cohen, a Jerusalem doctor, was shot and killed, one of four hostages who lost their lives. She was terrified to return, she said, but accepted the Ugandan government’s invitation because she wanted to confront the site directly.
“I wanted to look evil in the eyes,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It closed a circle in that way, because the Ugandans were so nice to us. But there was no closure for my father’s death.”
Standing again near the tarmac where she and the other children had played during their captivity, Cohen Gonen said the memories came back with force, but through adult eyes. The control tower, which had seemed enormous to her as a child, suddenly looked much smaller.
“I stood on the runway crying my eyes out, and had a long conversation with my father,” she said.
Gross said he was also terrified to visit. Gross, the only one of the hostages formally recognized as a victim of terror, said he remains in treatment until today.
“I didn’t know what going back there would do to me,” he told JTA. When he reached the old terminal, he said, everything looked the same, “as if 50 years hadn’t passed.”
Recalling the moment a terrorist struck him and knocked him to the floor, Gross said, “I broke down.”
Davidson, who said he returned to Entebbe to “meet his 13-year-old self,” compared the sense of public pressure and mutual responsibility then with the response to Israel’s hostage crisis following Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023.
“There was no WhatsApp, no protest movement,” Davidson said of Entebbe. “But the people of Israel demanded that the state do something. And they did it. There was actual leadership, both military and political.”
The newly released records show the government weighing whether to break with Israel’s longstanding refusal to yield to terrorist demands and discuss the release of imprisoned terrorists. The pressure came most directly from the hostages’ families, who wrote then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that “human life is more precious than principles,” pressed ministers to negotiate and, at one point, forced their way into the prime minister’s office to demand a meeting.
The rescue allowed him to move on quickly, Davidson said. “Maybe that’s why I’m not scarred.”
From the seat next to him, Gross interjected: “Oh, you’re definitely scarred.”
Laughing, Davidson said he remained hopeful about Israel’s ability to endure the current crisis.
“We’ll get through this,” he said, “because we have no other choice.”
Rabin's handling of the Entebbe crisis underscores how Netanyahu failed, says former Entebbe hostage
Cohen Gonen did not share Davidson’s confidence, comparing the army that reached them in Entebbe with the absence many Israelis felt on Oct. 7.
“I wish Benny would inject me with some optimism. Until now I don’t feel safe,” she said. “In Entebbe, it didn’t even come as a shock that the army came to rescue us. It felt natural and logical. But what happened on Oct. 7, with no army, no government, no nothing, it shook me to my core.”
She remembered flying home on one of the Israeli Hercules transport planes that carried the rescue force and the hostages back from Uganda, wrapped in blankets as soldiers handed sweets to the children. “You say to yourself, okay, something bad happened here, but the army was here,” she said. “You feel like someone is watching out for you.”
She viewed Rabin as a father figure, recalling running into him years after Entebbe at a mall when she was a student at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. “I told him I was there because of him,” she said. The two hugged and spoke for half an hour. When Rabin was assassinated in 1995, she turned to her husband, Oren, and told him, “Dad was murdered a second time.”
To Cohen Gonen and others in the room, Rabin’s readiness to resign in the event of failure stood in contrast with Netanyahu, who has resisted calls for a state commission of inquiry into the failures of Oct. 7 and has not publicly accepted personal responsibility.
“Today I have no Dad, in both senses of the word,” she said.
After Oct. 7, Cohen Gonen crawled into bed for three days, closed all the blinds in the house and armed herself with hammers and iron bars.
“To be abducted in Athens on an Air France plane makes sense,” she said. “But to be abducted at home, in the State of Israel, it was too much.”
Gross said Rabin’s decision to send a rescue force with “a hospital in a plane” showed he understood the operation could end with “dozens of dead and wounded,” and still treated the risk as his to carry, drafting a resignation letter in case the mission failed.
“He put that resignation letter on the table, because he knew that what stood between success and failure was a matter of seconds, and whether or not the terrorists would throw a grenade,” Gross said.
“That’s the difference between a leader who takes responsibility in real time and leaders who won’t,” he said.
After Oct. 7, Gross began going almost every day to the rehabilitation wards at Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, where many of the war’s wounded soldiers are treated.
“They’re our heroes,” he said. “Let’s hope we’ll see a new generation of leaders from them to take us to better days.”
'In Israel, we don't have quiet periods'
For Hershcu, Entebbe’s lesson was that terrorism could be confronted rather than accommodated. As a 21-year-old paratrooper nearing the end of his compulsory service, he had already been sent on discharge leave when the mission was put together.
Determined to join, he grabbed the rifle of a fellow soldier who was in the shower and reported for duty, a decision he said he remains ashamed of to this day.
Shot during the raid, Hershcu was left paralyzed from the neck down. Years later, he helped found LOTEM, an organization that makes nature accessible to people with disabilities.
He was reluctant to draw direct comparisons with Oct. 7 or discuss Israel’s current leaders, saying he had “no new insights” about what lessons Entebbe might hold. Even an operation that became part of Israel’s national mythology, he said, can fade in a country repeatedly overtaken by new crises.
“People forget,” Hershcu said. “Entebbe may be singular, but there have been so many others. In Israel, we don’t have quiet periods. There is just a chain of dramatic and tragic events.”
Ella Rosenkovitch, who at 5 was the youngest hostage in Entebbe, said Oct. 7 and its aftermath left her furious. Unable to accept that hostages were trapped in Gaza, Rosenkovitch joined the protest movement calling for their release. “I felt this is the only thing I could do,” she said. “Back then we felt that our leaders knew that saving our lives was above all else. These days we can’t say the same thing.”
She hesitated over the comparison to her own captivity. “What can I say?” she said. “What is Entebbe in comparison to this horror?”
Still, she agreed to speak once at a demonstration in Jerusalem, she said, because the former hostages from Entebbe had one thing to offer. “Hope,” she said. “Because they let us go.”
Regine Levi, another of the former child hostages, offered a different perspective. She was 6 when she was taken to Entebbe, but as a French-born child was released before the raid and only later immigrated to Israel with her family. Levi said she avoids talking about politics, not because she sees no failures, but because that is not where she chooses to look.
“We are not past Oct. 7. We’re still inside it,” Levi said. “So why focus on the division? The sense of responsibility for one another that we had then is still here. It didn’t disappear, no matter who the leaders are. That’s what I choose to see. That, and how amazing our people are.”