7 Days in Entebbe

Just finished watching the movie "7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE" - Those 7 days leading to a Spectacular Israeli raid in Uganda's  Entebbe Airport to rescue the hostages from hijacked plane.

In June, 1976 an Air France Air liner was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and landed in Entebbe Airport, Uganda close to Lake Victoria. The hijackers preferred Uganda, its eccentric dictator Idi Amin was perceived as being sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

Days of stalemate passed. Israel refused to budge from its stance to negotiate with the terrorists. But after 3 days passed, when the captors threatened to kill the children amongst the passengers in two a day if the Israelis don't release their comrades, Israel started talking.

But it was a clever pretentious tactics by the Jewish state to buy time to kill the terrorists and rescue the remaining passengers (148 non Jewish passengers had already been released). Unknown to the rest of the world in the outskirts of Tel Aviv a replica of the Entebbe Airport was built and a full scale rehearsal of the rescue mission code named "Operation Thunderbolt" was going on. 

Already 6 days into the hijacking and debating, the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin finally gave his go ahead to the mission. As the Prime Minister, Defence Minister Shamir and the Military Officers held their breath in a Cigarette smoke filled room, 4 Aircrafts filled with Commandoes took off to flying 2500 miles to land on the bank of Lake Victoria close to the airport in the middle of the night.

What followed was a swift and well timed Operation by the Israeli commandoes conducting a spectacular raid to rescue the passengers with minimal casualty. Only 4 passengers amongst the 102 passengers who were rescued were killed. All the 7 hijackers were mowed down along with 45 Ugandan soldiers, many before they could even realized that they were attacked.

The Israeli unit suffered one casualty - the Commando leader Yoni Netanyahu, the brother of the current Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost his life in that operation. (It probably brought the hardliner out of him). He led from the front and took the bullets as his first reaction team took on the control tower, bringing those shooting from there in no time. Yoni would later get the medal of Distinguished service posthumous. This Operation would go down in history as one of greatest military rescue operations with minimum casualty - something to be emulated as a lesson for the terrorists not to put the soft state tag on a nation.