{"id":93092,"date":"2026-07-03T18:56:28","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T23:56:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/?p=93092"},"modified":"2026-07-03T18:56:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T23:56:28","slug":"at-entebbe-reunion-former-hostages-say-oct-7-shattered-their-faith-in-israels-promise-of-rescue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/at-entebbe-reunion-former-hostages-say-oct-7-shattered-their-faith-in-israels-promise-of-rescue\/","title":{"rendered":"At Entebbe reunion, former hostages say Oct. 7 shattered their faith in Israel\u2019s promise of rescue"},"content":{"rendered":"

By DEBORAH DANAN<\/p>\n

(JTA) \u2014 TEL AVIV \u2014 For the survivors of Operation Entebbe, marking the 50th anniversary was less a celebration of one of Israel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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Entebbe Raid members gathered this past Monday at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in Jaffa. (Courtesy)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s defining military operations.<\/p>\n

To mark the 50th anniversary, Israel released previously classified protocols from the raid, later renamed Operation Yonatan, after Yonatan \u201cYoni\u201d Netanyahu, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s brother and the operation\u2019s commander who was killed during the mission. (Uganda\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cclose blood relations with Israel.\u201d)<\/p>\n

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A crowd lifts the squadron leader of the Entebbe raid on his return to Israel, July 4, 1976. (David Rubinger\/CORBIS\/Corbis via Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 Benny Davidson, who was 13 at the time, Shay Gross, who turned 6 in Entebbe, and Tzipi Cohen Gonen, who was 8 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Cohen Gonen\u2019s 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\u2019s invitation because she wanted to confront the site directly.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to look evil in the eyes,\u201d she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. \u201cIt closed a circle in that way, because the Ugandans were so nice to us. But there was no closure for my father\u2019s death.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his wife Leah Rabin attend the premiere of the film “Raid on Entebbe,” March 1977. (William Karel\/Sygma via Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI stood on the runway crying my eyes out, and had a long conversation with my father,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t know what going back there would do to me,\u201d he told JTA. When he reached the old terminal, he said, everything looked the same, \u201cas if 50 years hadn\u2019t passed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recalling the moment a terrorist struck him and knocked him to the floor, Gross said, \u201cI broke down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Davidson, who said he returned to Entebbe to \u201cmeet his 13-year-old self,\u201d compared the sense of public pressure and mutual responsibility then with the response to Israel\u2019s hostage crisis following Hamas\u2019 attack on Oct. 7, 2023.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no WhatsApp, no protest movement,\u201d Davidson said of Entebbe. \u201cBut the people of Israel demanded that the state do something. And they did it. There was actual leadership, both military and political.\u201d<\/p>\n

The newly released records show the government weighing whether to break with Israel\u2019s longstanding refusal to yield to terrorist demands and discuss the release of imprisoned terrorists. The pressure came most directly from the hostages\u2019 families, who wrote then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that \u201chuman life is more precious than principles,\u201d pressed ministers to negotiate and, at one point, forced their way into the prime minister\u2019s office to demand a meeting.<\/p>\n

The rescue allowed him to move on quickly, Davidson said. \u201cMaybe that\u2019s why I\u2019m not scarred.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the seat next to him, Gross interjected: \u201cOh, you\u2019re definitely scarred.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laughing, Davidson said he remained hopeful about Israel\u2019s ability to endure the current crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll get through this,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause we have no other choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohen Gonen did not share Davidson\u2019s confidence, comparing the army that reached them in Entebbe with the absence many Israelis felt on Oct. 7.<\/p>\n

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Tzipi Cohen Gonen, left, and Regine Levi embrace at a reunion of rescued Entebbe hostages in Tel Aviv, June 29, 2026. (Deborah Danan)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cI wish Benny would inject me with some optimism. Until now I don\u2019t feel safe,\u201d she said. \u201cIn Entebbe, it didn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cYou say to yourself, okay, something bad happened here, but the army was here,\u201d she said. \u201cYou feel like someone is watching out for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI told him I was there because of him,\u201d 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, \u201cDad was murdered a second time.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Cohen Gonen and others in the room, Rabin\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday I have no Dad, in both senses of the word,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be abducted in Athens on an Air France plane makes sense,\u201d she said. \u201cBut to be abducted at home, in the State of Israel, it was too much.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gross said Rabin\u2019s decision to send a rescue force with \u201ca hospital in a plane\u201d showed he understood the operation could end with \u201cdozens of dead and wounded,\u201d and still treated the risk as his to carry, drafting a resignation letter in case the mission failed.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe 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,\u201d Gross said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the difference between a leader who takes responsibility in real time and leaders who won\u2019t,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s wounded soldiers are treated.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re our heroes,\u201d he said. \u201cLet\u2019s hope we\u2019ll see a new generation of leaders from them to take us to better days.\u201d<\/p>\n

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